


Chained to the Magma Pit

by Intent_To_Stay



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angry Uzumaki Naruto, Angst, Animal Traits, Child Neglect, Debates on what makes life worth living, Dysfunctional Relationships, Fuuinjutsu, Fuuinjutsu Master Uzumaki Naruto, Gen, Genjutsu, Injury Recovery, Muteness, Naruto has anger issues, Neurodiversity, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Smart Uzumaki Naruto, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Universe Alteration, and everytime the answer is other people, crickets were harmed in the making of this prank, kinda hes still dumb but hes got a reason to think harder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2020-03-17 01:10:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 57,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18954877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Intent_To_Stay/pseuds/Intent_To_Stay
Summary: As a child, Naruto dealt with anger the best way he could--via revenge, screaming into pillows, and picking fights he couldn't win. Meeting the Nine Tailed fox introduces a new option for fun therapy.AKA the fic where Naruto meets the Nine Tails early and they can communicate--they just have nothing nice to say to each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> unbetaed and unedited, this plot bunny wouldn't leave me along. the first part of the story is a peak into the future.

Naruto stomped into his rundown apartment long past dusk. The street lanterns were lit below, and the crowds were delighting in the balmy spring weather. He didn’t care. He didn’t care at all. He threw himself on his bed and shuddered through deep breaths. He didn’t care about the festivities or how unwelcome he was, because he didn’t _care._ He fell face first into his bed and muffled his scream of frustration into a stained pillow.

When he finally stopped shaking, Naruto swallowed down the raw feeling in his throat and rubbed furiously at his eyes. His stomach rumbled with hunger, but instead of getting up to fix food, he rolled over and stared up at the ceiling. Instead, he pushed down the hurt sinking in his chest, and he willed himself into a quiet point of anger. His skin tingled, and then heated. The sound of the festivities outside, so far away and still so _loud_ , faded away into the hum of water running through pipes. A drip of warm water struck his cheek.

Naruto opened his eyes. Water sloshed around his knees, muddy and clouded. He looked to the battered bars of the towering cage.

Kyubi stared back down at him, bored and disdainful. He rests his chin atop a soaking paw. “You failed your test, loser.”

Naruto clenched his fist. His expression only twitched. Then he raised his palm out in front of him. He swiped it downward, and chains materialized, falling and striking into the water. The instant net caught Kyubi around the throat. It dragged the beast under the suddenly bottomless water.

Naruto waited until he felt a little better. Then he allowed Kyubi to gently float to the surface. He allowed the fox to breathe, to splutter curses.

“My day went great,” Naruto said with a happy smile. “Thanks so much. I finally achieved my dreams. I _owe_ you.” Naruto tilted his head down, and the chains tightened around the kyubi’s throat and muzzle, making the demon yowl in pain. The boy’s sunny expression darkened, and his voice softened. “You hate me that much? You couldn’t let me have a single thing go right?”

The kyubi yowled curses, and Naruto screamed right back. It was a normal Thursday, and the boy had failed his graduation exam for the first time.

\--

It all began when Naruto was seven, and he got so angry he blacked out. He came face to face with a strange world, full of shadows and buzzing halogen, with hot metal pipes and foul water. It dissolved a moment later, and he was right back in his class at the academy, facing off against his latest unfair teacher. But now his teacher’s face was pale. He sent Naruto back to his desk without any further scolding.

And before the pipes, that weird dream that felt so vivid, Naruto had been full of fury. He’d been indignant, ready to scream and yell that it _wasn’t his fault_. He got blamed for things that weren’t his fault, because it was easy to blame him.

But afterwards, he just felt confused. And shaken. His sandals weren’t wet, but they should have been. That’s how real it felt. He thought it might have been a genjutsu, but why would someone cast it? Thinking about it just made him frustrated, so he ignored the memory of his teacher’s shaken expression and his classmates’ detached confusion.

Instead, when he was alone, he tried to see that world again. Hot, muggy, and stagnant. Even remembering it made his spine prickle like bugs were crawling over his skin. It felt like his nightmares crawled out from underneath his bed and decided to tag along where they weren’t wanted.

After a few days of trying, Naruto gave up. He forgot about it and moved on.

\--

“Naruto,” the third Hokage sighed. He looked up from his desk and pinned the boy with a disappointed look. “What is it this time?”

Naruto glowered at the floor and shrugged. “I didn’t do anything.”

The chunin restraining Naruto with an ample amount ninja wire rolled his eyes. “He released several hundred crickets into a teriyaki restaurant and spiked the manager’s uniform with pheromones.”

“Where would I even get cricket pheromones?” Naruto challenged sarcastically. “It sounds like they just had a health code violation or a faulty container at the pet shop.” He shrugged his shoulders and twisted around, his fidgeting finally overriding his desire to look vaguely dignified. “I got an itch on my nose,” he complained, stamping his feet as much as he could.

“Then why did the restaurant owner insist it would be you?” The chunin huffed, but he reached over to scratch Naruto’s nose. “And why did you resist being brought in?

Naruto returned the favor by sneezing on it. “Ahh, thanks!” Naruto ignored both his second question and his thinly veiled look of disgust and yelled, “And that’s because I went to his shitty stand and complained about there being a bug in my food! Which there was! So he’s got a history of health code violations, and now he’s trying to blame me.”

“So if I were to check with local bug enthusiasts, none of them would tell me you bought anything of that nature?” The Hokage said.

“No!” Naruto huffed and looked past him. “Like anyone would sell me it. Hah, no, he’s got no proof, dattebayo!”

The Hokage glanced over to the chunin. “Thank you for your work. Dismissed.”

With a short nod of respect, the chunin released his hold on the ninja wire and retracted it into the mechanical reels hidden in his sleeves.

Naruto stuck his tongue out at him as he exited the office, rubbing at his wrists. He nearly bolted out after him, but that would just get him a longer lecture. The boy glanced back to the Hokage. “They got nothing on me, old man.”

“Your reputation precedes you,” Sarutobi said dryly. “Clever to use it to your advantage, I suppose.”

Naruto’s eyes widened at the praise, and he broke into a grin before he realized the implications. His surliness melted away, replaced with an excitement. “I used a henge today, too! It had everyone fooled--until I tripped, y’know?”

Sarutobi shook his head, cutting off Naruto’s unwarranted good mood. “You aren’t off the hook, Naruto. You forgot to wash your hands.”

Naruto looked down, only to see a single cricket happily perched on his sleeve. He blanched and shook his arm furiously, but the thing kept buzzing back to his sleeve until he smacked it. “Ahh, get off!”

Sarutobi eyed the display with a degree of humor, but he quickly sobered. “You are going to clean up your mess. And pay a fine to the establishment--"

“That’s not fair!” Naruto shouted, distracted from his disgust with the bug guts on his hand. “That bastard had it coming!”

“--And for stealing both the crickets and the pheromones,” Sarutobi continued.

Naruto gritted his jaw, before he decided to own up to his skills. “I didn’t steal any crickets,” he corrected imperiously. “I got them myself. Store bought ones don’t swarm right.”

“I’m not going to praise your ingenuity.” The Hokage pinned him with a look. “If you want to be a respected ninja, Naruto, you can’t pick a fight with everyone who looks at you wrong.”

Naruto bared his teeth. He’s not the one picking fights. Everyone has a problem with _him_ , not the other way around. “I don’t! Because then I would have to prank everyone!” His landlord, his teachers, people on the street. They all treated him like he was shit on their shoe, and he was sick of it!

“When you have difficulties, you need to file a report or submit a complaint,” the Hokage continued. “And I will take care of it.”

“Well, what’s gonna happen to the owner, huh?”

“Nothing,” Sarutobi stated. “Because you’re almost nine, and this is the fourth time I’ve had to tell you to stop in the last month, and you’re somehow under the impression that you can lie to my face. So nothing will happen.”

Naruto threw his hands up, his scarred cheeks flushing red in anger. “That’s not fair!” Naruto got a bug in his food, no refund, and an asshole treating him like dirt. He shouldn’t have to do _shit_ to help him.

“I think you will find it is,” Sarutobi snapped, his tone uncompromising. “And if it isn’t, I don’t really care.”

Naruto stood rooted to the spot, betrayal making his hands shake. He clenched them into fists and ignored the stinging in his eyes. “Fine,” he bit out. “I’ll clean up his shitty shop.”

“Then you’re dismissed. I’m taking the fine out of your stipend.”

And there went the new kunai set he had been eyeing for weeks. Whatever. It’s not like it would fix his horrible aim. Naruto turned stiffly and marched out of the office. He stomped all the way back to the other side of Kohona and glared the shitty shop owner in the eye. He had a cricket on his hat and a glower on his face, and Naruto didn’t mention either of them.

He spent the next few hours painstakingly collecting the dumb bugs and ignoring the obvious rage of the teriyaki stand owner. His mood progressively got worse as he wasted his day off. He should have washed his hands better. Or changed clothes.

 _Why am I so dumb?_ He went through all the trouble of not getting seen, and the old man clocked him in half a second. He would just have to be sneakier next time.

“Damn it!” Naruto cursed as another cricket escaped from his clutches. He scrabbled forward on his knees, chasing the slippery bug as it fled under a table. “Get back here!”

“Funnily enough,” Iruka-sensei said stiffly, “That’s exactly what I said to you earlier today.”

Naruto’s head whipped up, and then he yelped when it collided with underside of the table. “Ow! Hey, don’t sneak up on me like that, datebayo!” He had heard someone, but he’d assumed it was one of the few customers who had braved the shop’s partial re-opening.

Iruka glowered at him, not dignifying that with a response. “Quit making ninja chase you. It’s getting old.”

So he was grouchy about being outsmarted, huh? “Sounds like y’all are the ones getting old,” Naruto scoffed, not in the mood for a second lecture. “Not my fault you can’t see through a henge.” And Iruka had been the one to critique his henge just last week. Naruto felt deeply satisfied with the work he had put into his prank; his tireless efforts with the transformation jutsu had been mostly for Iruka.

“You have a cricket on your shoulder,” Iruka said, the vein in his forehead pulsing despite his calm tone.

“That’s Maki. He’s my second in command.” The little hellion had a half a wing to his name, and he still managed to escape every time Naruto so much as cracked the box open. He had quickly grown fond of the chirping bug.

Iruka snorted a laugh. “Comradery between pests?”

Naruto flinched, and suddenly decided he hated his teacher. Mizuki was now batting for the position of favorite. Iruka had dropped to the bottom of the list. “Yeah,” he drawled, loud and grating like he knew Iruka hated. “My dearest and only friend!” Naruto turned around and went back to chasing after the stray cricket.

Iruka sighed and dropped into a crouch. “Listen, Naruto, I’m not here to yell at you.”

“Really? You got something better to do?” Naruto jerked back and shoved the cricket into the container. He then stood and pointedly ignored his instructor as he listened for the next one.

“I’m sorry I called you a pest,” Iruka tried, rubbing at his forehead. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Naruto said bluntly, “sure you didn’t. I don’t have time. I’m very busy.”

“Here, let me help--”

“I don’t need your stupid help!” Naruto glared at Iruka, and his dumb look of frustration, and his constant wariness that he never gave to any other student. Iruka might try to pretend otherwise, but Naruto wasn’t stupid. No matter what other people thought, he _wasn’t_ stupid. “You’re too loud and I can’t hear them, so just leave me alone!”

Iruka stared at him, his expression carefully poised. “Alright. We have a quiz tomorrow. Don’t forget.” He stood and brushed a stray bug off his flack jacket. “Good luck.”

Naruto glowered at his retreating back. He nearly kicked his box of crickets because they were so loud he could barely hear himself think. “I’m not a pest,” he muttered as he chased down the last remnants of his prank. “I’m not.”

He finished gathering nearly all the bugs, and he figured it would just have to be good enough. The owner saw him off with a scowl, and Naruto flipped him off before he set off for a training ground where he could release his crickets. At some point, Maki crawled into his hair and started singing next to his ear. Naruto shuddered, but he let the bug have free reign. At least someone was happy to be around him.

The setting sun turned training ground eight into a golden zone. The sky above turned pink and orange, and Naruto whished he could enjoy it. Instead, he trekked deeper into the underbrush. Bushes caught at his pants, but he pushed further into the clearing where he first collected the crickets.

“Thank you all for your hard work,” he told the bugs as he set the box down. “Despite all odds, your mission was a success. The failure lies with me.” Somberly, he gave his subordinates a salute, opened the box, and quickly fled before any more bugs could jump on him.

He began the long trek back to his apartment, walking slowly through the streets with his hands shoved in his pockets. His stomach rumbled, and but the sour taste of anger prevented ruined his appetite. He shouldered his way into his apartment and flung his jacket in the corner. Cups, all in wildly carious states of cleanliness, covered his countertops, but Naruto ignored the mess and sunk into his couch with a tired sigh.

Then his hair started chirping.

Naruto looked around for a split minute before he began laughing. He put Maki on his bedside table, showered, and went to sleep. The singing drowned out the noises of the street below.

\--

He failed his quiz.

That was normal. Naruto wasn’t worth shit in academics. But the look in Iruka’s eye when he handed back the exams, all pitiful and annoyed, made Naruto want to chew glass.

He picked a fight with Kiba during taijutsu practice that day just so he could calm down. Kiba seemed to recognize it as a bloodmatch, because he kept making loud, cocky quips that only infuriated Naruto more. He got sloppy out of sheer anger, Kiba kicked his ass for it.   

Iruka spotted the beginnings of a nasty black eye when their class returned for end-of-day lecture, but he didn’t comment. Naruto tried his best to pay attention, but every word out of his instructor’s mouth felt incomprehensible. His mood didn’t improve.

Instead of going to the park or trying to tag along with some group from his class, Naruto walked over to the east side of Kohona. The teriyaki stand he pranked earlier that week was back in business. There were still a few bugs lingering on the edges on the premises, their chirping loud and clear.

Naruto snorted and then entered the adjacent pet store. He marched up to the front counter, and the clerk’s eyes narrowed in recognition. Naruto scowled at her in return. “I have a pet cricket. What do I feed it?”

“We don’t sell cricket food,” The clerk said. “Crickets are the food.”

Naruto argued with the clerk for a good ten minutes on the topic before he felt satisfied and ready to leave. He didn’t buy anything, which meant he would probably get kicked out the next time he tried to come in, but it was worth it. Some stores told him to scram immediately, and Naruto usually fought against that viciously enough that it wasn’t a battle worth picking. He had earned his reputation of being a hellion fairly, and he was going to prove it to everyone, one shop at a time.

He went home, ignoring the mess building up on his counters. Crickets were scavengers, so they really ate whatever Naruto had. He appreciated it. He had someone he could share meals with.  He ran to his room and grabbed the small container he had made for Maki out of a clean takeout cup and a pane of broken window glass.

Naruto carefully set the lid aside and greeted his pet with a soft, “Hey. Wake up.”

Instead of leaping from the box, the bug didn’t move. Not even when Naruto uncorked the bottle of leftover pheromones. They should still be good--Naruto had traded a lot a favors and money to get another orphan to agree to buy him some. It should have lasted for another day or two before losing potency.

Naruto stared into the box, and he leaned against the wall, giving it a little shake. Slowly, he slid down to a crouch, the drywall cool against his back, and poked the bug with his pinky finger. Maki didn’t stir, even though that morning, he had been chirping just fine.

Throat tight, Naruto rose and tossed the takeout container in the trash. It figured. Maki didn’t have wings. He was probably going to die all along, and Naruto was just too dumb to realize it.

Naruto finally cleared off his countertops, dully washing all the dishes he had neglected for the week. Mold had grown on a few of the dirtier plates, and an old cup of milk made him gag in disgust. He took his momentum and ran with it, soaking that bathroom in bleach and sweeping out everycorner of his home. He threw the old food from his fridge in the trash, not caring whether he would be able to afford more.

When his hunger finally broke through his single-minded focus, it was dark. His alarm clock batteries had finally died. The couple down the hall was arguing about whether to have a child. They couldn’t decide who would quit their careers to be the main parent. They wanted their child to have stability. They wanted little Mitsuki to grow up in a nice neighborhood. They didn’t want to raise a child in such a dangerous building.

Little Mitsuki, if ever born, would have good parents.

Naruto sighed and set some water to boil. Then, like some switch had been flipped, all the aches from scrubbing at the floors and his awful taijutsu match surfaced. Exhausted, Naruto flooped over the arm of his couch and laid there, awkwardly sprawled and staring at the ceiling.

Unbidden, his eyes started stinging, and Naruto let his tears run back into his hair.

Which one of his parents had wanted to raise him? Had they both rushed into the kyubi attack? Had they both been civilian? Had he been wanted at all? Did his mother know what she had done by giving him such a horrible birthday?

The argument got louder. The water in his kettle hissed, but didn’t scream.

Would they have let him keep a stupid cricket as a pet? Would they have kept it alive?

Naruto slammed his head into the cushions, and it did nothing to alleviate the pain in his chest. He twisted and buried his head under a pillow that smelt of sweat. He could still hear his stupid, rude neighbors and he hated it. He hated that stupid shop owners had a family to go home to, and that he never did. No one ever adopted him. No one ever would.

It wasn’t fair, and the whole world, just like the old hokage, didn’t really care.

Naruto screamed into his pillow and punched at his shitty couch, anger rearing up hotter than magma. It burned a painful hole in his throat and it never abated. It just built and built until Naruto’s skin heated up and tingled.

And then, between one scream and the next, his pillow disappeared, and Naruto snapped to awareness. He stood in the middle of a hallway, grubby water flowing over his bare feet. Hot steam hissed from the numerous pipes running along the walls. The light burned and buzzed like red-gold.

He turned, slowly. There was a door. The handle was a wheel, metal and rusted. It opened easily, and Naruto stepped inside. The door opened into a giant cavern, industrial and stinking of stagnant water.

Naruto stepped through, almost in a trance. He walked towards a feeling so similar to the burn of fury in his throat--and up to a row a giant columns. All neat and orderly in a line.

Except, as he looked higher, he realized the structure looming above him was not a platform, but a _lock_. The columns were bars. And the structure in front of him was a cage. He stared up at the paper pasted against the metal, trying to understand the script in the dark.

As his vision adjusted, he realized he wasn’t alone.

A red eye stared down at him from behind the bars, dark and stark against the white of an eye taller than him.

“What the hell?” Naruto breathed, frozen in shock.

And then the beast growled. A shockwave of ripples disturbed the stagnant water, causing him to flinch.

Naruto snapped back to consciousness in his living room. His heartbeat thundered in his ears and his skin tingled. Breath shuddering, he sat bolt upright and frantically looked around his shabby little apartment. His kettle still hadn’t boiled. The argument down the hall hadn’t moved on from screaming.

Naruto looked down at his adrenaline-shaky hands and said quietly, “What the _hell_ was that _?_ ”


	2. Chapter 2

Naruto could ignore a lot of things. It came with the territory: Sharp ears and a bad reputation meant he spent a fair share of his life shrugging off the sting of whispers. Not instantly, of course. He mocked his dismissive teachers, pranked the hell out of people who tried to screw him over, and acted just as rude as people were to him. But at the end of the day, if he didn’t learn how to get over it, he would explode. His brain would go on the fritz and send him into a spiral that had him screaming at spilt milk for lack of anything else to do.

So he learned to shove everything off the cliffs of his head. Away went his confusion, his frustration, his grudges, and anything he couldn’t understand. If he kept the with him, it would only weigh him down. It would scratch and scratch him down to the bone, and he knew better than to hold something so close.

Sometimes the more pesky hurts and tenacious mysteries would crawl right back up and reappear, like roaches emerging from a drain. His parents. His failures. The cold looks that he attracted. They showed up again and again, recurring and inescapable. He knew how to handle those as well. Naruto hugged his fears and his sadness, held them close to his chest and cradled them, and then smacked them right back down the drain and poured some emotional bleach to chase it.

But the fact remained:

He didn’t know how to ignore this.

It followed him to class and ate at him during his freetime. It showed up in his nightmares. The feeling of muggy, heat sunk into his skin and caused him to break into a sweat. It made him choke on steam during his showers, so he switched to lukewarm water. It made the red light of his alarm clock a threat staring at him in the dark, so he ditched it.

If crawled up again and again, because this little roach of a feeling wasn’t anger, and it wasn’t sadness, and it wasn’t pain. It was fear.

Naruto had never really been afraid of the dark. It had never been an option, back at the orphanage. No one cared if he was afraid, and so Naruto had to live with it. He wasn’t afraid of snakes or bugs. He saw them too often in the wild. And he certainly wasn’t afraid of people hating him, because he already knew with a defined certainty that they _did_. But he feared the orange-gold shadows inside that sewer.

And that made him mad enough to try to confront it.

\--

Hinata Hyuga felt well at home with being a wallflower. In the compound, she was never afforded the luxury of painlessly existing in the background. People were always watching her, looking for her to slip and shrink. It made standing all the harder, when there were so many people just waiting for her to fall.

It was why she appreciated the academy, even if the material got dull.

Watching her peers never dulled. They behaved so differently than the customs mandated within the Hyuga compound. Their expressions showed all sorts of emotions and thoughts. They didn’t watch her, waiting for her to slip. At the academy, she was the watcher.

She just wished she didn’t have to do it from such a distance.

Theoretically, Hinata could make friends. It’s just hard to do so without talking, and Hinata had never been good at it. Talking made her nervous enough to pass out. It hurt. Even when she managed, it came out weakly, creakingly.

Since everyone expected her to speak, it was easier to give people no reason to want that. So, she watched from afar and kept to herself.

 “Damn it!”

Watching Naruto wasn’t hard. He kept visible, in the center of attention. He had moments where he would wander off or sit quietly, but they were rare. He preferred to talk or yell or fight. During lunch, he often went around talking to people, and he obviously didn’t care that they were waiting for him to fall.

Hinata admired Naruto for that. He never felt scared enough to be quiet. He never let that stop him.

But recently, Naruto hid. He retreated to out-of-sight areas and sat without doing much of anything. Sometimes he would pace, or lie down, or climb a tree and hang upside down bonelessly, but most often, he sat with an expression of pained concentration.

When Hinata focused hard enough, she could feel him manipulating chakra. It would swirl around him restlessly before suddenly contracting. It felt like someone flicking the back of her neck, right where her blind spot would be. It felt unsettling. Enough so that she usually left quickly. But today, curiosity had her hidden in the shade of a tree, watching as Naruto forced himself to sit still for stretches of time.

Suddenly, Naruto jumped to his feet, and Hinata shrunk back behind her tree. She heard him groan in frustration and pace, back and forth around the base of his chosen tree, before settling back down. “Ugh. Just _stay!_ ”

Curiosity pricking at her, Hinata activated her eyes and scanned the area behind her.

Naruto sat in a meditative pose, although his knees were not level and his posture was too stiff. Chakra flared up from his skin, racing around him in agitated bursts. Most of it dissipated in the air, but that didn’t slow the flow of energy. Instead, after several long seconds, the energy condensed and spiraled inwards to the gate on his stomach. He was getting faster, she noted.

It was fascinating to see. Like a whirlpool, it cycled through and through, brutally focused. And then it shuddered, shook with a pulse of alien chakra, and the wonderous construct dissolved. Hinata’s eyes relaxed, but the afterimages remained as brightspots over her vision.

“Damn it!”

Hinata swallowed the lump in her throat. Despite how amazing it looked--Naruto’s chakra raised her hackles. It was ragged, furious, and barely controlled. He was trying to do some technique, that much was obvious, but the stranglehold he put on his chakra obviously wasn’t working. It retaliated, almost. The anger inside the technique wasn’t working.

It was similar to her eyes. He could get his chakra to move the way he needed. He just couldn’t maintain it.

Suddenly, Naruto growled, “What do you want?”

Hinata stiffened. This wasn’t like the mumbles Naruto used to talk to himself.

“I know you’re there, so just quit it!”

Hinata dropped her head and breathed through the sudden wave of anxiety that flooded her stomach. She then gathered herself and quickly fled. She wanted to apologize for interrupting, for spying--but she didn’t think it would work. She couldn’t make it work.

“Hey, dattebayo!” Before Hinata could get any further, Naruto hurtled through the trees and flagged her down. “Wait, wait!”

Hinata froze. Even when Naruto caught up to her, she couldn’t turn to look him in the eye.

He still faced her head on, without a glimpse of his earlier irritation. “How much time do we have left? Did I sleep through anything?”

Slowly, Hinata shook her head. Embarrassment rooted her feet to the floor, but she raised two fingers and then curled her hand into a lax fist.

“Uhhh, you mean twenty minutes?” Hinata nodded. Naruto grinned. “Wow, I thought I had way less than that. Thanks!”

Hinata wanted so badly to open her mouth. She just wanted to respond normally, for _once._ But her throat felt like it would crack open in she even dared. She shrunk inward and nodded.

 Naruto stared at her for a moment, and his expression flashed with hurt. Then he covered it up with a bright smile. “Sorry if I yelled at you! Just got frustrated, y’know? Thought you might have been. . . I dunno, _someone_.” Then he laughed, loud as could be. “Not that you’re not someone! I was just guessing Iruka-sensei or someone else who would yell at me, and since you aren’t them I figured I should, uh, just say that I’m not mad. At you.”

Hinata nodded stiffly, humming a single syllable of acknowledgement. After a moment, Naruto turned back around and started back to his own spot. “Thanks, I guess.”

Hinata clenched her fists until he was out of sight. Then she quietly picked her way back to the main courtyard outside the academy. She drank water until she could drown the crack in her throat.

\--

Naruto cursed under his breath as he once again lost his grip on the world of pipes.

After so many weeks of practice, along with some mind-numbing trial and error, finding the concentration to drop into that muggy, gross headscape wasn’t really the problem anymore. It was staying there for more than a few seconds which quickly proved impossible. The ground would shake, or the pipes shriek, and Naruto would flinch back to reality with a racing pulse. He usually didn’t even get to stay long enough to find the cavern, the one with the cage. The one with the malevolent eye. 

If he could just understand what the hell it was, he knew it wouldn't freak him out so badly. And if he could understand, he wouldn't have to go running to the old man. Naruto didn't think he was insane. He usually was certain that everyone else had a problem, and he sometimes felt like the only rational person in the world. But hallucinating, jumping at shadows, and generally hearing growls in his nightmares were not the signs of something normal. 

Fueled by frustration, Naruto closed his eyes and dived right back in.

Except this time, instead of a tunnel to collapse or a dead end room, Naruto appeared in front of the cage. His breath froze, and he looked past the bars with a feeling of dread. It settled on his shoulders and steeped in his chest, and he refused to run from it.

Bored, a single red eye glared down at him.

Naruto clenched his fists, feeling the water stir up and rush past his legs. It nearly knocked him off balance, but he kept his footing.

The eye narrowed. Lips peeled back to reveal gleaming teeth. “Pest,” the monster in the cage spat.

Naruto swallowed his fear and bared his teeth right back: “Coward.”

Claws struck through the bars, straining to tear him apart. Naruto flinched and woke up in his apartment. Pulse racing, he stood and splashed his face with water from his kitchen sink. Then he went back to his couch and shut his eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is nonlinear! The flashbacks, for the most part, are in order. I also had to split what i originally intended to be one chapter into two, so it ends on a bit of cliffhanger.

 (Present Day)

Naruto raced along the streets of Kohona, his chest thumping wildly as he ducked his way through the crowds. If he could just get out of the stupid onsen district, he could make it to the main shopping district! Simple henge, and he could ditch these losers.

Sure, for once he actually hadn’t done anything, but if he admitted that, he’d just look guilty for all the other times he ran. Plus, having half a dozen shinobis’ undivided attention was nearly as good as ramen, and he enjoyed the thrill of it. Naruto was damn good at running away. He knew the streets like the back of his hand. Every easy switch, every back entrance, all the good hiding spots. It was nice to be good at something.

He clipped through the shopping district, deciding to go for a challenge. The threat of unexpected rain, a sky full of dark clouds and strong winds, meant that the shopping district was going nuts--and that the frenzy would only provide cover for another ten minutes. They would look for him there, and it would buy him time to set up something fun. He hadn’t planned anything for today, but if he was going to be in trouble, it might as well be for something he decided.

He needed to be unpredictable! Unstoppable! The future Hokage would make daring escapes with all due carnage and collateral!

Just as he was considering the perks of bringing the eastern library to its knees, something grabbed him by the back of his jacket. Then the world blurred, jerked, and turned right over on it’s side. By the time Naruto could get a grip on himself and his dizziness, he was no longer in the alley connecting the main shopping district to the library.

He was in the Hokage tower. The very crowded Hokage tower, prickling with contained upset.

Naruto looked around at the dozens of shinobi in the room, all stern and pissed and at attention lining the round walls; at the Hokage with his eyes narrowed in a way that indicated he meant business; at the absolutely furious man on the left of the desk, whose pale eyes and blank face held nothing; at Iruka, standing to the right, all grim and tight-jawed with such a serious look in his eyes.

Naruto still said, with all due eloquence, “Damn. Nearly had it.”

\--

(Nine months previous.)

The thing in the sewer was a prickly bastard on the best of days, but once Naruto got the hang of keeping his grip, it didn’t really talk as much. It glared and seethed, and then settled into ignoring him. Naruto took that as a personal challenge.

He asked for a name. A reason. An explanation.

The asshole took a nap.

Naruto hadn’t spent all that time learning to stand just so he could get ignored. If he wanted that, he could go literally anywhere else. The silence made him lose his temper pretty easily, and then he would have to scrabble to keep his balance. He responded by monologuing. Having a captive audience had at least one benefit, and Naruto could tell the thing hated it.

“So I had to start a big argument because the guy refused to accept my answer! Even though I had the same points, just because it wasn’t ‘standard.’” Naruto stuck his tongue out and continued pacing around the cavern, trying to test how close he could get to the bars without feeling sick. “And _then_ , Iruka got me ramen because I _did_ get the right answer, even if it wasn’t the, uh, ‘usual’ way to go about it. He said I was unique, dattebayo, and I’ll take that over some dumb book definition any day.”

“That’s cute,” The thing in the cage murmured softly.

Naruto choked on his words, surprise knocking him out of his rant. The first words spoken to him in weeks. . . and they weren’t what he had been expecting. Despite the uneasiness in his stomach, he took a step forward. He could make out the glimmer of a sharp grin in the dark. “What?” He asked, and it came out quietly. It rippled over the sheen of water on the floor. “What’s cute?”

“That you love a person who despises you.”

Ice poured down Naruto’s spine. Water came in waves, buffeting his legs as the level rose. “He doesn’t. I don’t.”

“You adore people for the barest scraps of attention. Like a mutt.” The demon peaked open an eye. “Have you forgotten the endless anger you have for the same man? Has one meal filled the pit in your heart?”

Naruto brought a hand up to cover his mouth on reflex, but he didn’t throw up. He didn’t even gag.

He had talked about Iruka to this thing. A lot. Every slight or moment of anger or odd look. Naruto talked about it all, because no one ever listened to him, and he just wanted to pretend someone would.

It looks like someone had listened.

The demon’s claws raked against the bars, and it hissed, “It appears not,” and the waves knocked him under the muddy water.

Naruto woke up at the park. He didn’t make it off his swing before he spat out acid and a mouthful of barely chewed noodles.

\--

Naruto pushed questions away the same as he did with feelings, and he did it for the same reason. Old man third rarely gave him answers to much of anything. His teachers acted like he was a moron when he dared to interrupt class.

Questions were more trouble than they were worth, especially if Naruto couldn’t figure them out on his own.

But he couldn’t help but wonder: What was this?

Was he crazy? He didn’t feel like it. Most of the time at least.

What was the creature? Why could he communicate with it? Where was the sewer? Was it even real? Could it hurt him? What would happen if he opened the lock?

Did other people know?

Could they feel that there was something wrong with him? Did they sense the hatred that hung around the cage? Is that why they avoided him, scorned him, ignored him? Did they know something he didn’t, or had they always been able to sense something wrong with him?

Did the Hokage know? Did his teachers? Did the kids in his class?

Were they right to hate him?

\--

Naruto strolled into the sewer his arms clasped behind his head. “So what’s a mutt like you doing in a cage like that?”

The creature didn’t even twitch. It feigned sleep.

Fine. Naruto would just have to get better at asking the right questions. And he could grow some thicker skin while he was at it.

\--

(Present day)

“Naruto,” The Hokage said lightly. “How kind of you to join us.”

Naruto risked a glance over his shoulder at the ninja who brought him in. His rude expression faltered the sight of a ceramic animal mask. His teeth click shut. Purple hair. Long. Unless it was a wig, he’d know to look out for this one in the future. He hadn’t even seen ‘em coming. “Yeah. I didn’t realize it was something serious,” he said, refusing to be cowwed. “I see chunin, I think we’re just playing around, ya know?”

Iruka’s expression doesn’t twitch at that one, but it’s fine. Naruto could practically hear someone’s blood pressure rising, so he counts it as a win.

The Hokage smiled, the kind so bland it makes you close your eyes so it can be somewhat believable.

Naruto couldn’t tell if the old man expected him to know it was fake. He responded with his own chuckle, scratching sheepishly at the back of his head. He didn’t _love_ to piss off the old man, even through he had made his way on to Naruto’s shit list for various reasons. The third hokage was one of the few people who didn’t treat him weirdly. Naruto appreciated that. Even if he had ignored and avoided the old man for a while, Naruto’s grudge had simmered out and he knew enough to have some respect for the hat, especially in front of company.

“Ah, yeah, sorry for the trouble. But I can say for certainty--this time--it wasn’t me. I’ve been super well behaved, dattebayo!”

“You’re certain of that?” The old man raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t seem that upset. He seemed hopeful, in fact. 

Naruto thinks on it for a good fifteen seconds. He definitely had done nothing illegal or otherwise in the past week. He double checked Iruka’s expression, but the guy just looked a bit uncomfortable at second glance. So, the old man and Iruka could potentially be counted on, and that’s really all the encouragement Naruto needs to nod. “What’s my crime? I got an alibi.”

“I think some context might best explain our reasoning.”

Somehow, those few words are all it took for Naruto to lose even the shakiest bit of optimism.

The Hokage continues, “Do you remember our last chat?”

\--

(Eight months previous)

Iruka showed them storage and explosion tags during their unit on advanced ninja gear. Naruto snapped to attention so quickly that his neck cracked.

The papers weren’t nearly as simple as the sheet over the lock in the sewer, but Naruto recognized the similarity. Containment. Storage. Binding.

Seal.

It made sense, a dangerous amount of it. Naruto listened with rapt attention as Iruka passed around a few inert storage tags. His classmates poked at them, curious. Naruto had to bite his tongue so he wouldn’t vault over his desk and snatch it out of bug-guy’s hand.

When Naruto finally got a hold of one. . . it didn’t make any sense. He stared at the characters and lines and strange formatting, and it looked so needlessly complicated that wanted to slam his head against his desk.

Iruka drew their attention back to the front. “Now, one of the neat things about seal activation is that unless you program specific levels, a seal will either activate or not. It is an all or nothing impulse.” He held up an explosion tag for the class to see. “I can channel my chakra into the seal, but until I reach the limit required, I will not lose any. This means you can get a reference for how much chakra is required to make tags, and why there is such a high demand for them.”

Then Iruka channeled chakra into the explosion tag, causing the class to go wild with various levels of awe and fear. Iruka got tired of it quickly. “Settle down! I wouldn’t try this if it were dangerous. I don’t have nearly enough chakra to make a dent in this tag, not without channeling for several minutes.”

Mizuki grinned, and he held up an identical tag. “Who wants to take a crack at it?”

Of course everyone did: Some were more enthusiastic (Kiba and Ino) and others more studious (Sakura). But Mizuki walked around and gave everyone a chance to channel chakra into the tag. Some seemed more surprised or grossed out by the sensation. Naruto practically vibrated with excitement. He hadn’t thought to try channeling chakra, but that might make more sense than reading.

Iruka looked strangely constipated once Mizuki turned to Naruto’s side of the class. “Naruto, I’m not sure if--”

Naruto felt a surge of panic, and he jumped to his feet. “Please! Come on, I love explosions.”

Iruka raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

“Then I hate em!” Naruto bowed, dramatically and pleadingly, ready to whine and complain for the rest of the day if necessary. Iruka’s doubt singed his sensibilities, but the pay off. . . Naruto now had a frame of reference for the thing inside him. “Sensei, come on, I can’t even manage a clone.”

Iruka shook his head, but out of left field, Mizuki said, “Ah, let him give it a go!”

Naruto stared in shock. “Huh?”

Mizuki handed it over, and his grin was the same one he gave to every other student. Naruto almost didn’t take it. But then his elation overcame his surpirse, and he eagerly took the tag.

Naruto gripped the paper, his eyes bright with excitement. His chakra took a moment to get with the program, but he forced it to flow into the seal. It felt strange. Like there was a pressure and a direction to the way chakra soaked into the paper.

“Naruto,” Iruka warned, “If you try to include these in your pranks, it will not be fun.”

Now, there was an idea. . . that would definitely end badly. Naruto didn’t quite shelve the prospect yet. Explosions would be a great distraction! Just not around people.

Still, he couldn’t let Iruka have the last word. “What!? I would never! It’s just really super cool and. . . glowing?” Naruto stiffened as the sensation of his chakra disappeared. Like a first-bite-out-of-ramen amount of chakra, just gone in a _blink._ “Iruka-sensei. . . why is it glowing, dattebayo?”

Iruka froze. He put on a wooden smile. “Naruto. Put that down, alright? Don’t channel any more chakra. Don’t drop it.”

Naruto’s chakra did what it always liked to do in stressful moments: it lashed out.

The tag started smoking. Before Naruto could even blink, he flew halfway across the room and slammed into Kiba: Akamaru yelped, Kiba cursed, and Naruto heard the seam at the back of his jacket tear.

The window lining the side of the classroom exploded outwards in a rain of glass, and Mizuki’s kunai hit the tag midair, sending it flying.

The explosion rocked the walls, heat washing over the stunned classroom.

Iruka stood at the frontline, his shoulder braced against the desk that had previously occupied the front of the classroom. He dropped it after a tense moment and turned to see if anyone was injured. The barking command in his voice cut off the buzz of shock that swept over the room.

Naruto couldn’t take his eyes off the wooden table. There were gouges lining the front. The red paint bubbled and blistered, letting off a few thin streams of acrid smoke. The scent of it sat in Naruto’s mouth like a hunk of rubbery meat.

It didn’t occur to him, between the hell he had raised and trouble he had got into with the headmaster, to wonder how the hell he had managed to activate the seal. Not until later that night, when he was lying awake and staring at the ceiling, his gut twisting up with fear and stress.

“Was that you?” He asked the monster.

It didn’t answer, even when Naruto begged.

\--

It turned out there wasn’t much of anything in the library about fuuinjutsu, and it felt like a big rip off that his most recent attempt at learning was a bust. Naruto didn’t let that stop him. He hung around after class on a day about a week after the explosion tag incident (and had been super quiet and unobtrusive to curry some good favor) and cornered Iruka before he could escape (like he had when Naruto brought up the subject of the explosion itself). “Ne, Iruka, where’s the materials for seals?”

Iruka seemed surprised to see him, which means Naruto had chosen the right moment. He’d been distracted today, going off on tangents that he didn’t really intend to follow through on. He seemed in a hurry, but that was something Naruto could manipulate. He knew how to be annoying enough that it wasn’t worth it to deny him. It how he got pretty much anything done.

“Because I went to the library,” Naruto said before Iruka had a chance to ask, “and there was NOTHING! I mean, isn’t that supposed to be the center of all knowledge and all that? And you were talking about how cool and useful the whole thing was and--”

“Well, there wouldn’t be,” Iruka said. He looks more wary than bewildered, but Naruto restrains himself from adding on a mountain inane details. Iruka was one of the few people who would see through that bullshit. “Sealing is a very. . . guarded art. It’s dangerous, both in it’s applications and the risks involved in learning.”

Naruto can’t help but look at the replacement table at the front of the room. The windows had been fixed. The trees had recovered from the few fires that caught in the topmost branches. Even the walls had been repaired. But the table was different. A reminder, that no matter how much Naruto wanted to shove away the incident and forget, there was something strange. Something tangible to the cage he visited.

“So ya need to request it? Does the academy have anything? Because I’m not interested in explosions, I swear, I just thought maybe I could learn some more about it, ya know?”

Iruka shakes his head. “No. There are no learning materials. You might as well ask me how to forge a kunai or concoct a poison. It’s a highly specialized skill that requires a teacher, and Kohona’s few sealing masters are not going to teach an academy student.”

Naruto frowned. “Well, you take hot metal and do stuff to make a kunai. You find toxic things and make ‘em potent enough to hurt. Are you saying there’s _nothing_ about it?”

“No.”

And that’s where Naruto realized Iruka was lying. Iruka thought about things. He considered Naruto’s questions, even the dumbest ones. He might yell or get pissed off because he thought Naruto was messing around, but once the vein in his forehead went away, he got this little furrow between his eyebrows and he _thought_. He came up with analogies, and when those didn’t make sense, he found another and another and another. He had spent a whole week finding ways to talk about chakra, because ‘students all understand the world differently’ and he wanted to teach.

So when he answers, up front, without the slightest bit of consideration, Naruto stares at him. He stares and stares, and he finds that Iruka is still wary, but now for a different reason. It looks less like he’s expecting a trap, and more like it has already been sprung.

Naruto grits his jaw, and he averts his eyes so he won’t start yelling. He’s not stupid. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever.” So there might be something, there might not. Naruto would just have to comb through all his options. He’d have to crawl around and listen carefully and pluck gently any opportunity he stumbled across. Like trapping crickets.

Iruka’s eyebrows furrow, and he glances between Naruto and the clock. “I have to go, but--”

Naruto rolls his eyes and walks away. “Don’t let me keep you. There’s nothing. Boo-hoo, woe is me, and all that.”

He’s used to being disappointed.

\--

The old man took the time to visit Naruto while he was running around. It felt organic, like an accident. Naruto had been so excited to see the old hokage, because he never failed to look happy to see him.  Even when Naruto did something wrong or caused a scene, and he needed to be stern, he never really got angry. He never looked full of hate or fear.

When Naruto yelled about his dream to be hokage, and threatened to take that stupid hat one day, the old man didn’t look annoyed or bring up his track record or scoff. He smiled. And that was enough to make Naruto unbearably happy, the kind of happy that felt like drinking sunlight and watching a truly beautiful summer thunderstorm form in the sky. 

Naruto didn’t talk about that feeling to the monster. He didn’t mention it to anyone, because he knew it would spoil like the milk in his fridge. That feeling was for him, and him only.

After a few pleasantries (Naruto did enjoy listening to the old man wax poetic about nature, even if he didn’t really care about the subject), the hokage mentioned, “And I heard about your incident during the sealing unit. How are you faring?”

Naruto pushed down the impulse to proclaim that it wasn’t his fault. Especially since there wasn’t an actual accusation. “I mean, it scared the crap outta me. But Mizuki said repeat channeling can cause a glitch sometimes, and that he should have checked the tag better.” He doesn’t mention asking Iruka about more, because he was curious if the hokage knew about that too.

It turned out that Iruka did, even if the old man didn’t say it outright: “Did that ‘spark’ your interest, as one might say?”

Naruto groans at the pun, but he owns up to it. “Explosions are so flashy! Come on, old man, you got a ton of scrolls. Aren’t there any on sealing?”

The old man lectures him on subtly and the shinobi arts not being about flashy jutsu, and Naruto doesn’t mention that the idea of using explosions actually made him a bit sick.

“Okay, okay, I get it!” Naruto begged. He whined and pleaded and asked after it, because he knew it would help him.

“Sealing is reserved for genin,” the old man said, which didn’t answer Naruto’s question. “So I cannot offer you anything on the subject. Please don’t go chasing after the it.”

“But--”

“No,” the old man said simply. “It will not happen, Naruto.”

Iruka had certainly tattled, and the fact made him irrationally angry. Even then, Naruto grumbled but he agreed. He shrugged and then begged twice as hard for the old man to teach him a cool ninjutsu, despite not really being interested. And when that didn’t work, he threw a fit that was only partially feigned.

He needed to cover his tracks. Not be suspicious. Even though it felt like he wanted to rip his hair out because now he couldn’t be upfront about looking into the subject, he let only the slightest bit of disappointment show. He could ignore Iruka and certainly disobey him. But not the Hokage. Not if he wanted to look normal.

Naruto loved the old man, and that’s precisely why he didn’t want to reveal what a freak he was.

\--

It would occur to him, weeks after the fact, that Iruka had needed to go because he had to make a report to the old man. It made several odd phenomena tie together into a neat web. The feeling of being watched. The sudden quiet in his apartment building. How his instructors kept an annoyingly close eye on him. The chat with the hokage was just the thing that made it clear.

It occurred to him mainly because the demon pointed it out. It never tired of making Naruto upset, although it had started working less as Naruto grew used to the mind games. It was easier to accept some things than to fight about them. Yeah, yeah, he was a failure and he sucked and he couldn't pass his classes and _boo-hoo._ Naruto's irreverent attitude drove the monster up the wall once it realized he wasn't as easy to bait.

Of course, the monster was a bit like Naruto in that it didn't quit, but merely switch tactics. So, now it settled for making him paranoid and (when the opportunity presented itself) being  _right_. It became a weird game for Naruto: the monster was wickedly smart, but it also liked to cause him trouble. Naruto still listened more often than not. He could deal with the resentment and he knew how to ignore inconvenient details and he had a sense for when to call bullshit. But that meant he had to pay attention. He had to weigh out the theories given to him; more often than not, they made sense.

Dots connected. Iruka reported him. Maybe sealing wasn't allowed for non-ninja, but maybe that was a load of bullshit.

After spending a few hours running around, climbing the Hokage monument and doing his best to calm the irritation simmering in his skin, Naruto sat at the base of a tree. Iruka hadn’t mentioned Naruto’s questions because he wanted to help. He did it so the hokage would cut him off. His teacher could have just as easily _not_ mentioned anything. It wasn't a big deal. It was normal to be interested in a ninja art.

It drove Naruto insane because he couldn’t determine if other people knew. If there was a reason Iruka told the old man. If the old man forbid sealing from Naruto specifically.

If everyone in the world was in on a big secret, except for him.

But that also felt a bit _too_ paranoid.

Naruto pressed his spine against the smooth bark, and retreated to the cage. He didn’t bother saying hello to the monster. It stared at him, awake and unblinking. “You feel hate,” It murmured.

“I’m annoyed,” Naruto corrected. He walked forward; his emotions firmly controlled. “Try not to kill me. I know it’s really tempting.”

He had a seal. It was at his fingertips, if he could be brave enough to reach for it.

\--

(Present Day)

“Yeah, I guess. You told me to pass my genin exam, which didn’t happen.”

“I’m referring to your interest in sealing.”

Naruto shrugged, his brain whirling as he tried to keep his memories straight. “Yeah, you said it was too complicated. Why is it important?”

“Because you never spoke about it again, and yet your behavior reflects a different story. You began sleeping through classes. Not talking to your peers. You instructors noted you were withdrawn and unmotivated.”

‘Noted’ is a pretty cowardly way to say ‘reported.’

Naruto held his ground. “I was a bit frustrated, yeah. I had some bad dreams and it exhausted me.”

“Yes,” the Hokage agreed. “That is what you told young Iruka.” Iruka remains motionless besides the hokage’s desk. He stares straight ahead, to the back wall, looking right over Naruto’s head without the decency to be smug. Instead, there’s a little furrow between his eyebrows, the kind he get’s when Naruto’s being difficult and he can’t muster the energy to be angry about it.

\--

(Seven Months Previous)

“Naruto,” Iruka said tiredly as class ended for the day, “Stay behind, please.” A taunting _oooooh_ rose up from the back row. Kiba shoots him a cocky grin that fails to come across as friendly. Ino looks pleased, probably because he had taken special care to ruin her hair during taijutsu practice and she wasn’t satisfied with a simple win.

Naruto rolled his eyes at his classmates’ jeers, but he picked his head off the table. “Yeah, yeah. Just don’t take too long.”

Iruka’s eye twitched at the insult, but he waited for the last stragglers to filter out before curtly waved Naruto forward. Iruka put on his sternest expression, the kind he saved for lectures Naruto was bound to find especially boring. “You’ve been sleeping through classes and skipping. That’s going to stop. You can’t slack off just because you get bored, Naruto.”

Naruto sneered at him. It figured. Iruka always had to keep moving to goal post. “You told me to quit being such a distraction! Well, look: no distractions!”

“You need to pay attention, too! Your scores have been dropping, and you can’t afford to go any lower.” Iruka sighed, his expression pinched and pained. “You’re scraping along as is. If you want to be eligible to apply for early graduation, you can’t keep doing this.”

Naruto ignored the way his stomach turned in fear. He needed to graduate. He needed access to the genin library if he wanted any hope of understanding what the hell was going on inside him. “No one else has a problem with it! They all seem thrilled."

His teacher was too easy to rile up. Iruka slammed his palms on the desk and shouted, “That’s because they don’t care if you fail!”

Naruto scoffed. Big news. “And you do? Hah, I don’t need it, dattebayo.” Naruto casually observed the vein popping out from Iruka’s forehead, the same one that pulsed when class just wouldn’t behave. The sight of it weighed strangely on his chest. Was this how he looked when he started screaming and slinging insults?

It looked kinda pathetic.

Iruka reached up to rub at his temples, forcing himself to calm down. “You are my student,” he recited. “Of course I care.”

Naruto didn’t buy it. Not for one second. If Iruka cared, he wouldn’t hide things. He would have helped Naruto the one time he came to ask about a topic that held his interest. Instead, he cut Naruto off. He reported Naruto to the Hokage, which earned him an interrogation. Iruka lost the right to give a shit, even if he acted nicer than the average instructor.

Naruto’s scalp prickled with his building outrage, his regret at being dumb enough to ask a question he actually cared about, but if Iruka realized how much it had hurt, Naruto’s story of a passive interest in fuuinjutsu would fall apart. It would collapse into a pile of questions he couldn’t answer, not without admitting there was something seriously wrong with him.

He needed to relax. Chill out. Get some stuff off his chest.

With barely a thought, Naruto shut his eyes and inhaled. He dropped through the floor of the classroom and exploded out from the water.

The demon cracked an eye open, but it saw no need to

 respond to his ensuing passionate rant. Naruto stomped through the water and screamed out his frustrations.

“--and he’s LYING! He sold me out the first time, and now he wants to pretend!” Naruto growled, and he kicked at the calf-deep muddy, mucky water. “It’s always _shut up, Naruto_ and _quit messing around_ and the SECOND I tried harder, he shut me down.”

“Are you done?”

“No! I hate it when they pretend--like I can’t see how they look at me. Iruka may be nicer than the others, he may apologize or treat me to food, but I know he thinks there’s something wrong with me!”

The demon sighed. “Are you done?”

Naruto glared at it. It seemed so tired recently. Less cutting. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks for your stunning support, as always.”

Naruto opened his eyes before he finished exhaling. “I get nightmares.” At Iruka’s confusion, and then worried stare, Naruto shrugged. He’d had nightmares for years, on and off things that made his sleep restless and unfulfilling. So it was the truth. He would always brush them off upon waking up, but recently his sleep had been more polluted. He woke up with a racing pulse, sometimes tangled in his sheets, sometimes on the floor with a crick in his neck. He knew it was the monster in his head, and that didn’t change the fact that he needed to _nap_.  “That’s why. I’m really tired, and it helps to hear people.”

Iruka’s mouth pursed. He pulled out the chair from behind his desk and nodded his head for Naruto to sit (which he did easily enough because rolling chairs were _cool_ ). “What kind of nightmares?”

Naruto swiveled around and around, finding it a lot easier to sit still and focus. The classroom blurred into a fascinating spiral of beige walls and warm wood and dark blue. “A thing wanting to kill me. Lotta graphic threats about being eaten, mauled, impaled--kinda basic, in all honesty.” He drew up his legs to his chest and spun around all the faster. “Just--super--tiring,” he called out, as dizziness started catching up with him.

Iruka reached out and brought Naruto’s spinning adventures to a smooth halt, preventing him from slumping out of the chair with a gentle hand that made Naruto nearly flinch. “It’s not normal to have nightmares,” he said slowly, “especially every night.

Blinking, Naruto tried to find a decent response. While he was at it, he searched Iruka’s eyes. Did he know? Did he know more than Naruto? “Guess I’m not normal,” he finally replied with a shrug, noting the way Iruka’s expression tightened. He ignored how warm his shoulder felt.

The academy instructor recovered quickly enough. He straightened up and tapped his chin, obviously thinking. A bit too obviously. “Do you eat right before bed? Sugar? Or things you might be allergic to?”

Naruto shrugged again, unsure where this sudden surge of concern came from. “Uh, I eat whenever, ya know?” He didn’t want to admit to Iruka that there was something wrong with him, even if everyone knew it, but he matched Iruka’s exact brand of honesty: obviously dancing around something vital. “Can that give you bad dreams?”

Iruka launched into a mild lecture about proper eating and the proper time for eating. Most of it flew over Naruto’s head because he stopped paying attention once he realized Iruka had grabbed onto the easiest explanation. Food was easy to solve, and Iruka, despite his altruistic streak lately, didn’t seem to really want to go past that.

Admittedly, it was also easier for Naruto to just look like he was paying attention for a few minutes, all starry-eyed, and go, “Wow! Never knew! I’ll try that out.”

Easiest con he ever played, and it meant that he had time to go do something productive. Naruto raced out of the academy, deciding to take a stroll through the town. He didn’t necessarily feel like picking a fight, but It helped to remember why he was angry. It made him stupid enough that he didn’t need to be brave.

One needed to be very brave to get near the seal above his head. Or dumb enough. To get there, Naruto had to scale the bars of the cage (and avoid the occasional claw swipes that would attempt to catch him off guard), but he knew it wasn’t exactly _physical._ He could move faster than light through his mindscape, but he could also get trapped in the weirdest blocks. He could climb, and he used his hands to do it. . . but it wasn’t _really_ his hands. It tired him out in a strange way that left no strained muscles or achey limbs. He was climbing, and he always had a body, but it wasn’t really his body.

A few weeks ago, Naruto had realized he could raise the water levels in his head and swim up. But again, it wasn’t really _water_. It was a mess of nasty emotions that he usually let go of. But if he wanted to get close, he had to hold them close. It wasn’t fun, but it was fast. Or it could be, if he could figure out how to do it.

When the water rose, he could swim his way up to the seal. He knew that. However, the first few times, he drowned himself. He choked and floundered and inhaled all sorts of nasty, foul debris, and he still refused to quit.

He knew he could, and so he would. He had to understand what was inside him. He had to know what the seal _did_ , because the distinction was an important factor to whether or not he could sleep at night. His curiosity and his need to know drove him to endure, even when it left him exhausted, frustrated, and buzzing with hateful thoughts.

It made him all the more victorious when he succeeded.

The first time Naruto burst up from the murky water, gasping for air that was never really air, he had screamed in victory. The demon in the cage watched him with a poisonous expression, but it retreated into the shadows and let him explore the secretive sheet of paper.

Naruto looked at it, read the characters, absorbed it into his brain--but he wasn’t _really_ reading. He felt the seal as much as he saw it. Forcing the blurring, shifting characters into something resembling stillness required focus. It required touch, in a way that was far more than surface level examination. The feeling of it creeped through his body, and he could understand the way the seal worked because he _knew_ it. Like how his wrist could only bend so far, or how he could slow his heartbeat if he focused, or the sense of a current that ran through him when he meditated his way into the sewer.

When he pressed his hands lightly over the seal, it felt like he found another body part he never knew about. It had veins and a pulse. It quickened and slowed with his own feelings. It sparked in the seconds before the demon lashed out. The components and pathways fit together and branched out and interwove into a cage and a distillery and a promise. The lines of the seal anchored into _him_ , and he searched it’s winding and woven paths until he could feel it even without being in the sewer.

“You know something when you take it apart,” the demon rumbled. “Remove it and you will be free.”

Naruto knew enough to understand that was an awful idea. It was a seal, and he knew it made him into a container. And he couldn’t let this hateful thing out of its cage. Instead, his voice refusing to remain steady despite how much effort he poured into keeping control, he asked, “Who did this?”

It had stared at him for a long time. “Wouldn’t you want to know?”

Naruto wasn’t going to get any help from the angry, stupidly unhelpful monster in the sewer. He wouldn’t get help from the academy, or the Hokage, or Iruka.

Fine. It still wasn’t going to stop him.

\--

(Present Day)

“Yeah, and it was true!” Naruto stared at the hokage with a challenging expression, even though he kept his voice light. “Turns out that when you leave a kid alone all the time, there’s no one to deal with the monsters under the bed.”

That didn’t warrant a response. Instead, the old man asked, “I would like to understand why the subject, of all of the more academic shinobi arts, caught your interest.”

This was a chance to either redeem himself or dig his grave, and it boiled down to how vulnerable he could stomach being in front of dozens of shinobi. “I liked being good at something,” Naruto admitted. He restrained himself from scowling, but only barely.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

He wanted a fucking list? Naruto grit his jaw before he decided it wasn’t like he had any pride anyway. If the old man needed it spelled out since he hadn’t been paying any attention, then Naruto might as well make a show of it. The demon in the sewer had driven home all his shortcomings, all the things Naruto used to deny or dance around. It stopped hurting a while ago. It was simple fact: it didn't matter why he wasn't good or how much effort he put in to change things, because as it stood--

“My taijutsu sucks. Genjutsu nonexistent. I don’t have the talent for the most basic ninjutsu,” Naruto listed off, counting on his fingers as he went, “Not good with basic weapons, don’t have the money or connections for more advanced instruction, don’t have any clan techniques by virtue of being a bastard orphan, not good at reading or code breaking, and I’m plain awful at pretending.”

Before the Hokage could say anything to that, Naruto sucked in a dramatically large gulp of air and continued, “Can’t do poisons because I’m too stupid to follow instructions or remember which is which. I’ve observed that my charisma must be somewhere in hell because I’ve never managed to charm literally anyone! I suck at tracking. I poisoned two of my classmates with mushrooms that I could have sworn were edible.” At this point, Naruto ran out of fingers by even the most generous of estimates, so he just started pointing at random objects and people, waiting for the Hokage or someone to cut him off.

Potted plant: “Don’t know how to forage for food.”

Iruka: “Can’t pay attention.”

Tall, dark, and angry: “I can’t regulate my emotions.”

Portrait of the Yondaime: “My crowning achievement is growing creeping vines out of that guy’s nostrils this spring.”

“You’re good at public speaking,” the Hokage interjected, his tone level and a bit joking.

That’s fine. Perfectly fine if he thinks it’s a joke. It is a joke, kinda. Naruto rolled his eyes. “I figured if there was literally any shinobi art that could make use of a blunt instrument like me, it would be the one where you can convert lots of chakra into cool effects. No skill required. It looked really difficult to screw up, so, yeah, I was a bit obsessed with it.”

“That is not how the art of sealing works, Naruto. It’s a complicated--”

Naruto shrugs. “I wouldn’t know. It’s a village secret, apparently.”

It looked like his disrespect rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

The old man didn’t even have the decency to respond to that either. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed most of the shinobi. Iruka stayed. The old hokage glanced to a long-haired man who had been standing behind the desk. He stepped forward and began talking, but Naruto stopped paying attention the instant he did. He saw his eyes: coldly hateful, but also moon-white.  However, in the shadow of that man, with pale eyes and fine silk clothes, was Hinata Hyuuga.

Hinata stood silently, her head bowed and bangs covering her face.

And with that one piece of information, everything clicked into place. It culminated into a realization:

_She did it._

And then that realization took a turn for the worse:

_She did it, **and she got caught.**_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bonus points for anyone who can guess what happens next.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part 2! i edited some stuff in the previous chapter so reread the last part if you need to.

(Five months previous)

“So you don’t really talk to anyone, huh?”

Hinata startled, yelping into her bite of onigiri and whipping her head to the side.

Naruto jerked back in surprise, nearly tripping over the tree roots. He pinwheeled his arms, stumbling to regain his balance. “Ah! Sorry, sorry!”

Oh. Hinata’s eyes widened, her face rapidly heating. She looked so foolish, with half chewed rice spat all over her dark pants. Frantically, she brushed at her lap, managing to squeak a single breathy and broken apology. She bit at her cheek as Naruto stared at her, and she couldn’t meet his eyes.

The silence hung in the air oppressive and ugly. Naruto let off a single weak laugh, like he always did whenever he failed a jutsu or answered a question he truly thought was right. “I, uh, was wondering if I could sit. With you. For lunch.” He rubbed at his neck, eyes closed with the force of his grin.

Hinata didn’t say no. She slowly nodded her head, glancing back to the courtyard to see if anyone might be paying attention to the two of them. However, Naruto had been the quietest he’d ever been for the past few days, and without the effort to make himself visible people chose to ignore him.

At her permission, Naruto dropped into a squat and opened up his own bento. It had a bag of barbeque chips and a large carrot. He ate as quietly as one could with crunchy foods, but he still finished long before her. “So. . . You don’t talk, right?”

Hinata dropped her gaze, slightly calmer but still the slightest bit bewildered. She shook her head.

Naruto hummed, his face scrunching up as he analyzed her. The intensity of his stare made her grit her jaw, a quiet flicker of unease running through her.

Finally, he nodded decisively and stood, brushing the crumbs from his pants. “Cool! See you around!”

He ambled back the academy, arms clasped behind his head. Hinata’s stomach twisted with equal measures of relief and disappointment. Naruto talked quite a bit. And that appeared to be a dealbreaker for company. That was fine. Hinata knew the price for her comfort. She had grown content with it, so it was no real loss to watch as Naruto strolled away. No real loss, she told herself again.

The next day, when he returned with little cup of instant ramen, she somehow felt more surprised than the first time.

He dropped to the floor and reached into a weapons pouch. “Can you write?” Naruto looked up to her, head tilted in curiosity, and in his hand was a small, raggedy paper scroll. He held out the scroll and a pen.

Blinking, Hinata couldn’t help but wonder if this was a prank. Or a henge. In a moment of hesitant bravery, she accepted them. The pen was warm. The scroll was empty, and she used the lid of her bento box as a table. _Yes_. She wrote, her penship just the slightest bit unsteady.

“Cool!” Naruto said with excitement. She visibly saw him tramp down on it when he asked, “Uh, do you want to write? With me?”

The question made her stomach twist, but she didn’t hesitate as she pointed to the single word she had already written.

_Yes._

Naruto’s eyes widened. He broke into a grin once more. “Awesome, dattebayo!”

\--

Naruto sat with her during lunch from that point on. He rambled sometimes, but he asked just as many questions. At first, Hinata hadn’t know how to respond, so unused to needing to think of what to say. However, Naruto never repeated himself. He waited, quietly, for minutes at a time as she wrote things, scribbled them out, and rewrote them again. Then, only once she had finished her message, he would read it with a scrunched-up expression. He took a long time to think on her words, giving her ample time to eat. When he handed over the scroll, he said his own response. Then he waited again, for minutes at a time, as Hinata figured out what she wanted to say in response.

The first few days, they barely exchanged half a dozen statements. As Hinata got faster at writing, as she got more used to thinking about what she wanted to say, it didn’t remain that way.

“Iruka keeps getting on my case about taijutsu,” Naruto said, dully irritated. He picked at the grass besides him, his chakra spinning round and round idly at the gate on his stomach. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, it wobbled.. He had gotten a lot better at it. He barely looked like he was focusing anymore.

Hinata released her eyes, realizing that it was probably impolite to stare, despite how pretty the chakra exercise appeared. She tapped her pen against the scroll, considering the issue.

 _~~I think that might.~~ _ ~~~~

_~~I’m sorry, but I think~~ _

_I agree. The steps you use are inefficient. He has your best interest at heart._

Naruto stared at the scroll for a long time. Hinata shifted, and it suddenly occurred how rude that had been. She just wanted to write quickly, but Naruto didn’t need a lecture from her as well--

“Ne, Hinata. . . What do these two words say?” Naruto said softly. He pointed to ‘agree’ and then ‘inefficient,’ his expression stiff. His ears were red.

Hinata blinked in surprise, before taking the paper back. She thought on it for a moment. Above _agree_ , she wrote _think yes. true. feeling._ Above _inefficient: bad. wasteful. failing._

Naruto read the words, and he laughed softly. “Hah, yeah, that makes sense. Uh, thanks. But I really don’t have someone to practice with, so I’m stuck with class time, and Mizuki kinda sucks.”

Hinata responded, her kanji purposefully simple and interspersed with katakana, but her head was whirling. The next day, when Naruto sat by her, she handed him a small pocketbook.

He blinked in surprise, but as he leafed through the beginner dictionary, his ears grew redder and redder. Hinata bit her cheek, regret washing over her. She saw the potential insult too late: he would think she was calling him stupid, and that always sent him into a screaming match with his teachers--

Naruto laughed, rubbing at the back of his head. “Wow, Hinata, thank you! This is really helpful, ya know?”

Hinata buried her face in her hands, her cheeks bright red. She grabbed the scroll before she could think any better of it: _Taijutsu? I can help._

Naruto looked at her, wide eyed and blinking. Then, his mouth melted into a smile, one that showed no teeth. He looked at her like she occasionally caught Hanabi staring at the moon: “Y-yeah. That would be awesome.”

\--

(Present Day)

“Sorry,” Naruto blurted out, covering for the uneasy feeling gripping his chest, “I’m lost. Am I in trouble for. . . hanging out with a classmate during academy hours?” He forced himself to be rude, glaring at the man--Hinata’s father--with a sour sneer on his face. “This is bullshit!”

Hinata didn’t look up.

Her father glared. “You attempted to manipulate my daughter into divulging clan secrets.”

Naruto blinked with the audacity of that statement. “What?” He glanced to Iruka, to the Hokage, but they didn’t respond. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The hokage tilted his head, eyes sharp. “Is this how you interpreted the situation, Hinata-chan?”

Hinata hid her hands in the sleeves of her jacket, but Naruto knew she was clenching her fists. She would draw blood if she didn’t keep her nails trimmed. Naruto had seen her file them down enough to know. “N-no. He did not ask me. . .” Hinata’s voice faded at the end, and her mouth worked soundlessly. “He. . . I . . .”

Naruto couldn’t watch it. “Let her write it down.”

Hiashi Hyuuga glared at Naruto like a snake, and a wave of animosity crashed over him. Naruto flinched back a step and ran right into the uncompromising wall of the Anbu behind him, his pulse suddenly racing.

“My daughter can _speak_ if she wishes to say something.”

“Hyuuga-san,” the hokage said in warning. “Please calm yourself.” Then he looks to Hinata and inclines his head. Hinata clenches her fists and stares at the floor, drawing in deep but silent breaths.

Naruto bit into his cheek, anger flaring up on his friend’s behalf. Her father knew she had trouble. He knew it better than Naruto, and yet he refused to help her. To him, her quietness was another flaw, another weakness, another problem that made her useless and undesirable. There was nothing wrong with Hinata. She had plenty of brilliant things to say. She could communicate perfectly well if anyone would just give her a _chance._

Naruto ground his teeth tighter and tighter, and then Hiashi disregarded Hinata, opening his mouth to spout off more _bullshit--_

“She writes things down,” Naruto muttered, his voice growing louder and rougher as the burning in his stomach got hotter and hotter. He ignored the warning squeeze on his shoulder. “That’s how she speaks. That’s the easiest way for her to talk! If you actually gave a _shit_ about what she had to _say--_ ”

Naruto took a step forward, and the whole room shifted. It tilted right off the edge from the precarious balance of ozone-air indifference. Hinata’s father looked at him, and that was all it took. It was the danger promised in the expression. Cold fear that sprung up to choke him, and Naruto didn’t step back a second time. He froze. Feet rooted to the floor. The whiplash leaves him stunned, still and wide-eyed, pulse faster than a trapped rabbit.

It was the same hate he faced day after day from the monster in the cage. And there were no bars to keep him safe.

“Naruto,” the hokage said, and his voice was lower and harsher than he ever, ever used. “Be still. Be quiet.”

And Naruto was so stunned in that second, his limbs rubbery and lax with fear, that he did nothing other than obey. Hinata’s father averted his gaze.

“Hinata-chan. Please, do you have something to add?”

Hinata lowered her head, her bangs falling over her face and hiding her pale, dull-mirror eyes. Silently, she shook her head.

\--

(Three Months Previous)

Naruto moved to the back of the class. Not next to her, but along the back wall, next to Shino. He caused no trouble. He picked no fights. In class, he didn’t look her way.

Hinata was grateful for it. Naruto was still too infamous to fade away in a small room. He had a presence that drew attention.

Until the class got used to it. Then he sat in an open spot on the second row, next to Choji. He caused no trouble. He picked no fights. He took notes, which shocked a good number of people. In class, he didn’t look her way.

The class got used to it. By the time he sat next to her, no one thought anything of it.

_Hi. Hope this is ok?_

Hinata wrote on her own scroll, subtle and calm. _Yes._

\--

One day, Naruto didn’t sit by her in class. His chakra buzzed, prickly and obtrusive enough to get disgruntled stares from the class.

Hinata couldn’t find him when lunch came. She bit at her lip, checked to see that no one was watching, and then activated her eyes. Naruto’s bright chakra system exploded into view, secluded among the trees south of the courtyard. Hinata relaxed her sight, ignoring the tension building in her skull. She made her way over, purposefully unhurried and idle. Ino called out something to her, but Hinata pretended not to notice.

As she got closer, she noticed his chakra still burrowing and twisting, but contained. He didn’t hear her when she sat. He didn’t stir for several minutes. When he opened his eyes, he flinched and shrieked “What the hell?!”

Hinata leaped backwards on impulse, her scroll flying from her hands.

Naruto jumped to his feet, glaring at her furiously. “Leave me alone!” And with that, he turned and ran. He didn’t come back to class.

He apologized the next time he came to the academy, a week later.

“I didn’t qualify for early graduation.” he finally said, sitting over ten feet away, behind a tree. Like he couldn’t bear to be seen.

Hinata activated her eyes anyway.

“I know it isn’t an option for most people, but I begged the old man, and he agreed. I just had to meet the old requirements.” He dropped his head in his hands, his voice cracking. “War time requirements. The ones that were so easy we had five-year-olds graduate. I couldn’t even manage to get that.”

Hinata stood up and slowly walked to stand in front of him. He didn’t look up at her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I was just mad. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

Hinata sighed and penned her response. When Naruto didn’t stir at the click of her pen, she held out her scroll and dropped it on his head.

Instead of spluttering, or reacting the way she hoped, he hunched over further. Hinata knelt. She took his left hand and eased it away from his face. Then his right. He still didn’t look up.

She places the scroll in his hands, rolled to her response:

_Of course I forgive you._

_Now spar with me. I need to get faster._

\--

“Hmmm,” Naruto muttered. He chewed on his thumb nail, and his expression was pinched in deep thought. “Should I prank. . . Kiba? Or the headmaster?” He jumped to his feet to pace, considering the possibilities with increasing excitement. “Iruka? I gotta keep him on his toes.”

Hinata quickly penned her response. _Do you have to prank anyone? You’ll get into trouble._

Naruto glanced at her with a frown that he quickly hid behind a toothy grin. “Hell yeah I will! That’s the point. If I don’t raise a little hell, who would I be?”

Hinata raised her eyebrows, unimpressed.

Naruto sighed. They had learned each other’s body language enough to know she had questions. And even if he didn’t like it, Naruto rarely hid things from her. “Look. . . I know you hate attention. I know you get too much of it.”

Hinata frowned, thrown off balance but willing to listen. She. . . didn’t talk about her family that often. Naruto tried his best to be pleasant, and that meant he paid attention to what she did and didn’t like talking about. And since Hinata didn’t try to hide her tense relationship with her clan--since she communicated a boundary and Naruto _listened_ \--that meant she had to deal with the discomfort that came with vulnerability.

“--But I don’t. People would love to forget I exist. So if the only time people pay attention is when they need to yell, then that’s what’s gonna happen. I’m not. . . at peace when I’m unnoticed.” Naruto rubs at the back of his neck. He sighs and sits down again, picking at a thread unraveling from his cuff. “Because if I don’t raise hell, no one will acknowledge me. No one will give me the time of day--they may side-eye me or whisper, but they won’t. . .”

Naruto, sometimes, had just as much trouble finding words as her.

“They won’t look at _me._ So if people are gonna treat me badly, it’s gonna be because of something I did.”

Hinata considered this. A quiet prickle of anger and sadness sprung up in her chest, a little thorny vine that made her regret asking. Because it pained Naruto to admit it, and it hurt her to hear it, and she hated that it existed and that she couldn’t understand why. At first, before she met Naruto, she thought he cultivated people’s annoyance. She thought it was defiant or brave or childish--and she had to realize that it was all of those things and also none of them

Naruto had a garden full of weeds. People already hated him, without him having to do anything. All he did with pranks and disrespect was plant his own seeds. He made a garden of outrage. He made those glares into something he owned.

 _The headmaster._ She wrote. She frowned at the page.

_And get Mizuki, too. He keeps giving back-handed compliments to Sakura. I hate it._

Naruto’s look of shock melted into one of excitement. The gears in his head visibly turned, and he whispered, “Ne, Hinata? Have you ever designed a prank before?”

Hinata had not. It didn’t remain that way for long.

\--

Naruto took credit for it, and he took the blame, but in the aftermath, all he could talk about was how well it went. “And the timing? Perfect! Mizuki was so humiliated that it had him _spitting._ ”

Hinata couldn’t contain her smile. Hesitantly, she held up her scroll. _I may have another idea._

\--

“Ok, so we have the materials,” Naruto said. He held the storage tag close to his face, examining it with a clearly hungry expression. The seal itself was about as long as his arm, and he combed over the symbols like he was trying to read them. “And you’re sure this thing will hold enough water?”

Hinata remembered the explosion incident. Mizuki had rationalized it as a flaw in the tag, but Hinata could see Naruto’s chakra stores. She knew it wasn’t a glitch. _It has enough room for ten gallons._

“Hmmm.” Naruto checked their notes. This was the largest, and certainly most destructive prank yet, and Hinata’s propensity to plan out things meticulously had gained Naruto’s respect very quickly. He didn’t always follow the plan, because spontaneous problem solving was often required, but the scale of his pranks had increased very quickly. “I got the sealant for the doors and the chia seeds. So if we want it to fill the room, we’re gonna need. . . twenty-four trips.” He groaned. “Damn! So it will need to be an over-night prank, which means I’m definitely going to get caught.”

Hinata swallowed, nervousness picking at her. But she stared at her feet and pushed past her discomfort. It was so minor, so easy to look past compared to their first meeting. “I think we can improve the tag.”

Naruto doesn’t respond, and when she finally glances over, his eyebrows are nearly hidden under his goggles. He jolts when their eyes meet, and he apologizes. “Sorry, I just. . . I mean, it kinda threw me for a loop--"

“I can talk,” Hinata blurted out. She winced, and nearly goes to write it down, but she wanted to _try_. “When I’m. . . when I feel safe.” And when she has to. When her father expects an answer, Hinata can force herself to talk, in the same way she can force herself to stand back up despite how her body screams in pain.

“You don’t gotta explain,” Naruto says quickly. “I mean, it’s your business.”

Hinata shook her head. “I want to, though. You’re the only person who has ever waited for me to speak on my terms.”

Naruto laughed. Not a mocking one, but a startled one. Breathy and weak. Like he didn’t know what to do with the sincerity in her voice.

“I like writing. But I think I could like talking to you.”

“You. . . have a nice voice.” At Hinata’s ensuing surprise, Naruto laughed again, this time a little hysterical. “Sorry, sorry! It’s just weird to hear you, ya know?”

Hinata chuckled in response, her face feeling warm and her throat clear and painless. “It is.”

They quickly launched back into business. Naruto’s surprise wore off quickly.

“This tag has a storage capacity proportional to the amount of chakra it is primed with.” It was sort of an heirloom, a seal that had been copied down for years. The Hyuuga used it to fill a small, specialized pool at the compound in order to train children in water walking. Repeated uses degraded the pathways, so the seals had to be replaced regularly. It had been an easy task to spot the least worn tag and request it for her own meditative purposes. “It’s very old and very inefficient compared to modern issued ones. But you have stores to increase it.”

Naruto flinched. “I--I do?”

Hinata nodded. “They aren’t useful for the average shinobi considering they remain active for a very short time frame, but--”

“No, no, I need to back up. Why do you think I have enough chakra to make a dent? That explosion tag was a glitch, dattebayo.”

Hinata shook her head. “I don’t think it was. The Byakugan is poor at judging how much raw chakra a person has, but I’m certain that you have enough.”

“Byakugan?”

Surprised, and a little taken back, Hinata pulsed chakra to her eyes in a demonstration. The veins around her eyes swelled, and the world dissolved into monochrome intensity. Naruto’s star-bright chakra jittered in shock.

“Wait, that’s why your eyes do that?!”

After a long conversation about bloodline limits (one where she had to switch over to writing very quickly), Hinata realized that Naruto knew a shockingly small amount of basic knowledge about Kohona’s clans. They didn’t have the time to plan the rest of the prank because he asked a lot of questions which took a turn for the strange.

“Is there anything weird about my chakra?”

_Not really. Everyone has different traits._

“What does it look like when I do this?” He closed his eyes, and Hinata pulsed hers, and she saw the way his chakra began to spiral over the gate in his stomach.

_Like a meditative exercise. You’re cycling chakra through your stomach gate._

“Huh. And there’s nothing. . . wrong?” The tension in Naruto’s back betrayed him even more than the content of his questions.

_Nothing. It’s normal._

“Huh. . .”

However, the next day, she and Naruto worked out the timing, the direct path through the ceiling, and the river closest to the academy that wouldn’t noticeably lower. He would hide the tag immediately after he finished, and Hinata would pick it up before class began.

Naruto, with a quick glance to ensure they weren’t being watched, pulled out the water storage tag. “So I kept adding chakra. Not sure when I should stop.”

 _ ~~It degrades.~~ It will lessen and leak out over time, so the best time would be while you are filling it._ Hinata penned a set of directions and even a small diagram. It explained how to accept and expel the water.

_Put both hands on it and hold it under the water while you channel. It flows in and out at a set rate, so be careful and leave enough chakra to avoid exhaustion._

Naruto stared at the seal, his expression furrowed in deep concentration. “I really wanted to learn fuuinjutsu. I still do.” He smiled at her, his concentration drifting away. No, not drifting--redirecting. Focusing on her. “So this is really cool. And it’s a brilliant idea. I wouldn’t be able to pull this off without you, ya know?”

Naruto smiled with his eyes closed when he couldn’t bear to see how people would respond. He bared his teeth and grinned. It was a defiance and a threat and a display of disrespect and a promise that he gleefully didn’t care.

This open-eyed smile, the one that lit up his face and made his eyes glimmer with unguarded happiness?

He only smiled like that when the two of them were alone.

\--

In the early hours of the morning, when the first unlucky teacher decided to stumble in and brew a pot of stale coffee, they were bowled over by a flood of water which ripped through the hallways. Classes had to be moved outside, and Naruto gleefully owned up to it. Hinata picked up the tag from their chosen hiding spot, and she stored it away in her pouch.

He had burned away through the last of the pathways. It was now just a sheet of plain waxed parchment. She would dispose of it at the compound, because Naruto had been adamant that it couldn’t be traced. She agreed.

Naruto wrote notes to her in class, when he was finally allowed to return. _I filled the room to my chest. I only planned for about half of that. They have no clue how I managed. Iruka even looked impressed, despite how angry he got._

 _I knew you could._ Hinata scrawled in between her notes, not allowing her expression to reflect her excitement. Mizuki lectured about war strategies that had helped secure difficult battles, but it all seemed rather dull.

_I’m gonna tell them it was jerry-rigged pipes. Bamboo and duct tape and the water pump from my shower. It’s gonna drive them insane that they couldn’t see it coming._

Hinata couldn’t help but feel proud. She didn’t like the destruction, and more often than not she refused to help with vicious pranks, but this one made her feel. . . clever. Sneaky and unseen and still powerful.

And a week later, when the chia seeds sprouted overnight through the hallways and in the teacher’s lounge cabinets, and Naruto declared his genius to the whole class, Hinata knew he was complimenting her just as much as he was reveling in the attention.

\--

(Present day)

The hokage sighed at Hinata’s silence. “Naruto. I would like to hear your side of the story.”

Naruto took half a second to convince himself he didn’t feel betrayed. He then dropped into the sewer like a stone. He swam up through the water, buzzing and shaking. The orange-gold light flickered. The pipes hissed.

“ _Shit,_ ” He hissed. “Fuck.”

The monster peered at him curiously, and slowly grinned. “Oh,” It sang in its growly tone, the note lilting in the air. “You know fear.”

“I’m gonna bounce some ideas off you real quick,” Naruto blathered. “Ok. I complained about fuuinjutsu and not getting to learn. I was upset because I--” He yelped as the ground shook. “I felt stupid. I kept losing taijutsu matches. I just wanted to yell and vent.”

“Dull. Could you not come up with something more entertaining?”

“There’s no way in hell I’m lying to the old man!” Naruto shouted, his voice tinged in hysteria. “He can smell it! Like a bloodhound.”

“You overestimate the perception of others.”

“If I fuck up, Hinata gets burned. I can’t risk it.”

The monster chuckled. “So noble. You wish to defend her when she can’t spare a word towards--”

“Oh, fuck off! Be rude when my ass isn’t on the line.”

The monster’s red eyes look unbearably smug. “You can make this more personal,” it offered. “Perhaps not a whole truth, but a partial one. Be clever enough, and it can be convincing.”

“Hit me,” Naruto said, desperate enough to consider some poisonous advice. It made for good brainstorming help.

“That pathetic human teacher of yours betrayed your confidence once. He insulted you, so you decided to air a long list of grievances.”

“Throw Iruka under the bus?” Naruto hated that he didn’t immediately refuse. “But he’s right there, and I don’t want to. . . hurt him.”

“He has hurt you,” the monster argued. “And if you wish to keep your other lies intact, isn’t that a small price?”

Naruto felt sick. Like he drank gallons of foul water and held the weight of it in his stomach. “Iruka. . . he got really angry at me for a prank,” he rehearsed. “I got angry at him too. I told Hinata because I couldn’t look at him without wanting to explode. I told her about how he shut me down on sealing, and how he reported me for it, because I was ranting about everything.”

“You can do better.”

Naruto clenched his fists. “How he reported me for it and didn’t have the guts to own up to it, or the shame to apologize, or how he thought I was dumb enough to not notice.”

The monster rumbled with pleased laughter.

Naruto cursed, feeling anxiety running over his skin. “This is your fault, bastard. Quit being so pleased.”

‘Hate me,” The monster said with a laugh. “I’m sure that will help drag you out of this.”

Forcing himself to refocus, Naruto tugged at his hair. “I didn’t ask for clan secrets. She acted as a friend. She. . . just wanted me to not be so sad.”

“You’re very good at begging from the mud,” the monster said with a sick amount of praise. Naruto refused to react, because he didn’t have time for mindgames. “Humans are so averse to weakness. They look away in disgust, or pity, or even out of joy.”

Naruto wished he could feel pain in this place. He wished the demon could, too.

“Show them a rotting wound, and they won’t go looking for maggots.”

Naruto opened his eyes and finished exhaling. His pulse was too loud. He stared the Hokage dead in the eye and refused to acknowledge his teacher.

“I got really pissed at Iruka-sensei,” He stated plainly. “I couldn’t look at him without wanting to explode, so I talked to Hinata because she’ll listen to me rant. So I ranted. I brought up everything, and I talked to her about fuuinjutsu because he shut me down on the first subject I was interested in, and lied to me about the reasons for it, and reported me to you for it. And he didn’t have the guts to own up to it, the shame to apologize, or the braincells to realize I knew he thought I was dumb enough to not know.”

That last tongue twister barely made sense to even Naruto, so he barreled on. “I didn’t ask for anything, and definitely not clan secrets. I didn’t even know if she had access to anything about fuuinjutsu. I just complained that I wanted to learn something, and I couldn’t. I didn’t say anything about you forbidding me from it. So she didn’t know that.”

“Hinata. . . just wanted me to not be upset, I guess. If she grabbed anything that was top secret, I know it was out of ignorance.” Then Naruto couldn’t help but glare at her father. “I didn’t _conspire_. And, besides, Hinata wouldn’t have fallen for that. She cares about her family a lot more than me, so she probably considered it inconsequential. If she tried to be sneaky about it. . . I guess it’s because you would throw a giant hissy fit over me daring to _exist._ ”

The glare he got was truly impressive, but Naruto held his anger close. He sneered and glanced back to the Hokage. The old man didn’t give away his thoughts, and nervousness twisted in Naruto’s stomach.  

“Hyuuga-san,” the old man said evenly. “After hearing this explanation, do you still suspect Naruto for attempting to subvert the integrity of the Hyuuga clan?”

“. . . His story matches my daughter’s without appearing to be the result of previous collaboration. His confusion upon being summoned read as genuine.” Hinata’s father closed his eyes and tonelessly said, “I rescind my accusation.”

\--

(One week previous)

Naruto hadn’t slept in a few days. That much was obvious. He was listless and quiet and he asked strange questions about his chakra.

One day, he dropped into his unusual meditation and came out crying and shaking.

Hinata had felt frozen in the face of it. She hadn’t known what to do.

Naruto hugged at his knees and rambled, his voice cracking in and out. “And he didn’t let me try. He lied and he must think I’m stupid--I’m deadlast so I am, I guess--and I just wanted to be good at something, ya know?”

She shook her head. “I don’t,” she whispered.

He clenched his fists. “I think there’s something wrong with me,” he whispered. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Naruto had trouble reading. He devoured his little pocketbook, and he had improved, but he still wasn’t as good as other students. He couldn’t remember to do things. He got frustrated over tiny things and ignored looming obstacles like he couldn’t see them.

He had still never talked about himself like this.

“I just need to _understand._ I’m months away and I’m _scared--_ ”

That he wouldn’t pass again? That he wouldn’t qualify for early graduation?

“Why are you scared?”

He shook his head. “No. Nope. _Not_ gonna happen, _dattebayo._ ” And then he took heaving breaths and shook and didn’t respond when she tried to calm him. “I just wanted to learn, and they cut me off, so I don’t know what they know. Do they know? Is there a _reason_. . .”

She couldn’t console him. He didn’t move when it came time to return to class, and if Hinata didn’t show up it would be suspicious. Her father would hear.

Hinata grabbed her friend by the shoulders. “Naruto-kun, please. You need to calm down.” Her voice failed, and she had to croak, quietly, “You’re sca-scaring me.”

He wiped and scrubbed at his face and croaked out apologies. “It’s that stupid seal. It all comes down to that stupid seal. And I don’t have a chance because I can’t learn anything, and I don’t _understand_.”

Hinata had to leave him. It hurt, but she had to. Her family couldn’t know and she couldn’t slip. She had kept this a secret for months, and Naruto would forgive her. He would understand. He learned how to fade away for her sake.

She could learn to step up for his. There had to be something she could do.

\--

There was. And it reminded her that even if she felt clever and useful and powerful when no one was watching, all it took was a single stare for that to crumple.

\--

(Present Day)

Iruka didn’t look at Naruto as he walked (escorted) him home. He didn’t look pained. He looked like it was just a mission to him.

Naruto kept his silence. If Iruka wasn’t bothered, he wasn’t going to apologize. It would be a flaw in his story if he backtracked. It would get him questions.

“It was my duty to report on the progress of my class,” Iruka finally spoke. “Your interests included.”

Naruto chewed on his cheek, and he swallowed back dozens of questions. He asked the ones he didn’t care about, the one he already knew the answer to: “Did the old man talk to anyone else about what you said?”

Iruka sighed.

Naruto laughed, hollowly. “Yeah. I thought so. And I bet it’s your duty that you can’t tell me why.”

\--

Hinata didn’t look at him. She sat next to her cousin in free times, who was a blank wall of animosity. She didn’t open her mouth or look anyone in the eye.

Naruto couldn’t catch a moment alone. She avoided him. Didn’t look at him. Teachers made him sit at the front of the class, and Naruto responded by being the biggest pain in the ass that he could. He got sent out nearly every hour. He got in trouble. He got yelled at.

It just made him more furious.

He broke into the academy, and he didn’t leave any pranks in his wake. He left a note, taped unobtrusively under Hinata’s desk.

_Are you okay? Can we meet?_

When he checked again, there was a single response in Hinata’s pristine writing:

_No._

Naruto sat where they used to sit. In the space where he had hidden the water storage seal, Hinata left behind her writing scroll. It held no new messages.

\--

He spent more time with the monster. It spoke freely now, soothing and poisonous in the same breath. The pain felt gratifying, somehow. It felt like scratching a bug bite until he drew blood.

“If you weren’t evolutionarily programed to be such a bitch,” Naruto drawled, sending his chakra snaking through the seal on the cage, “you could get some peace. But now we’re back to square one. Aren’t you proud?”

The monster glared at him. “If you had kept your incessant mouth shut, you wouldn’t have driven away the one creature desperate enough to tolerate a pariah.”

The monster had a certain charm. He was just such a horrible fucking person that Naruto couldn’t help but be impressed. “Hinata wasn’t desperate,” he said. “She was like me.”

“You are the epitome of desperation. Do you not remember?”

Naruto narrowed his eyes, distracted from the tedious process of examining the seal. “What? Spit it out.”

It laughed. “You found that girl strange. Her mannerisms left you uncomfortable and disturbed. You spent hours in frustration, forcing yourself to learn because she was too fearful to speak.”

Naruto’s jaw grew tight. He bared his teeth. “Past me was a dumbass. Hinata’s brilliant. She’s just too cool to change for other people.” Then, he states with a degree of forced normalcy, “I was supposed to know how to read anyway. She helped me learn.”

“Or,” the monster argued casually, bypassing Naruto’s latter statement in favor of picking at the first, “You are good at forgetting. You’re desperate enough to forgive any flaw, ignore any discomfort--because you will get nothing if you can’t settle for the bottom tier.”

“That makes you bottom of the barrel,” Naruto spat. “Drop it. I’m not listening.”

In a high, grating imitation of Naruto’s human throat, the monster complained, “’She’s so _weird._ Why can’t she just _talk_. It’s so _annoying.’_ ”

“SHUT UP!”

“I’m merely repeating your own words.”

Naruto shook with the force of his rage. “I was stupid!” Yeah, he hadn’t really understood at first, but he did now! And he never let himself treat her differently. Hinata didn’t need special treatment, because despite what her family thought, there was nothing _wrong_ with her.

“No,” it crooned, “That was your only intelligent moment. You found a solution to your plight, and you pretended kindness so you could benefit. Your foolishness was forgetting your purpose. You forgot she was a tool.”

“People aren’t tools!” Naruto screamed, finally dropping the buzzing and furious mess of a seal. He stood on the surface of the water, and the whole cavern shook and rumbled. “I was--am her friend! Maybe I did it for a dumb reason, but that doesn’t change anything!”

The monster hummed in consideration. “Perhaps you have a point. Shinobi are not people, in a sense.”

“If I wanted to use a person,” Naruto said, “It was probably one of your brilliant ideas.”

“No. It was your design. Your desperation.” The water shook with the monster’s laughter. “Your loneliness merely proved more painful than ignorance.”

Naruto sometimes wished he could drown the monster. He wanted to walk into the cage and skin the mutt alive. He wanted to eat its heart raw.

“I remember my previous container,” it said, and the hate it exuded felt powerful enough to drown in. “I know shinobi. You will be used until broken. Just as you used a poor, desperate creature.”

\--

(Six Months Previous)

If Naruto had taken to avoiding the Hokage tower, no one really noticed. The old man had gotten busy and blown Naruto off one time too many. Naruto wasn’t gonna bother with him until he got an apology, dattebayo!

And it looked like that wasn’t going to happen.

Fine, whatever. It’s not like he cared.

Instead, Naruto dug at the packed dirt with the toe of his sandal, watching the people of Kohona go about their business. The binding at the front of his shoe was unraveling, and he needed to sew it up at some point. He just couldn’t remember where he put his emergency sewing kit, and he had already torn his apartment apart while looking for it, and now he couldn’t stand to be there more than necessary. The mess made him feel jittery.

He would clean up. Eventually. He just had to get around to it when the time felt right.

Sighing, Naruto pushed off from his spot outside the gorcery. He could go home, quickly make some ramen, and then get back to. . . whatever he wanted, really. He wished he had something he wanted to do.

As he walked down the road, people noticed him. A father’s eyes widened, and his kid yelped (“My hand!”). Naruto stuck his tongue out at him as he passed. A store owner he had pranked a few months previous glared as he strolled by, and he shot her a sarcastic grin. A group of ninja weren’t as subtle as they thought, and they noticeably stared at him on their way to the hokage tower. Naruto just rolled his eyes.

He dropped into the sewer mid-step. “Can you die?” This was as much an insult as a legitimate question. “Like, will you starve at some point?”

“Not before you,” it answered, and it sounded vaguely pissed off at the fact.

“Ruuuuuuude,” Naruto drawled. He approached the bars and got a warning growl for the trouble. “So I’m stuck with you?”

“I’m not the one who insists on you visiting,” the monster snapped. “It is entirely your choice to incessantly pick at this place.”

“Hmmm. I feel like you’re grumpy. Why so grumpy?”

The monster turns away and doesn’t dignify the teasing with a response. Naruto counted it as a win. He laughed and said, “I’m just messing with you, dattebayo! Jeez, it’s just small talk.”

“You’re avoiding the eyes of those who would rather see you dead,” the monster corrected.

Naruto frowned. He was never sure if the monster could see outside the cage, or if it was just smart enough to find little patterns in Naruto’s visits. It never gave him a straight answer. Most of the time it didn’t give him an answer period. It didn’t matter either way, because Naruto was suddenly jerked out of the sewer.

“Ow!” He dropped his sack of ramen, grabbed his shoulder, and glared at the guy responsible.

Pale, with long, dark hair and a absent expression. He had absolutely no problem shoulder checking Naruto, despite how unconcerned he appeared. But more than anything, there was something oddly familiar about him.

“You might find more success in walking,” the boy said plainly, “if you kept your eyes open while doing so.”

Naruto couldn’t have been distracted for more than a ten seconds, tops. Time didn’t flow along normally inside the sewer. And, yeah, judging from the packages in the boy’s hand, he had come from the red medicinal shop the next street over, meaning he probably rounded the corner and didn’t exactly _mean_ to run into Naruto, but those little facts felt less important in the face of how _rude_ this guy was.

“You might find more success making me regret it if you weren’t such an asshole!" Naruto sneered, and he realized that he knew this guy. He attended the academy. He walked home with one of Naruto’s classmates--the quiet girl with the same white eyes. Naruto snatched his dropped groceries out of the dirt, debating how badly he should prank the guy’s class. Something colorful--his whole outfit was so _bland._ He could use a little green and pink to spice it up. Naruto purposefully shoved past him, mentally tallying how much pigment he would need to make an impression.

The guy sidestepped the worst of , but Naruto’s elbow still brushed his arm. The boy hummed tonelessly but didn’t retaliate. He had a demeanor that promised to forget you instantly.

Naruto tried to project the same energy, but he had to force himself to not look back as he grappled with another rush of odd familiarity. His rubbed at his elbow, his mind no longer whirling with visions of the colorful monstrosity he would unleash. 

He dropped into the sewer. “Did you feel that? Am I right?”

The monster snorted. "Pest."

Naruto ran the rest of the way home, and he ate in his bedroom. Slowly, over the course of a few hours, Naruto grew hopeful. And then he began planning. He drafted several dozen ideas and scrapped them after the monster pointed out one obvious flaw or another, but he refused to grow discouraged. He just kept thinking.

Because Naruto didn’t understand seals, but he knew how they felt. Like the current of a river or the pressure of a breeze or the instinct to move.

And he felt a current, just a glimmer of it, just a smudge, in the second he slammed into that haughty kid.

So even if it was a wild goose-chase, even if it turned into nothing, Naruto had to _try_. He had to get his hands on something concrete. And if that meant dancing around the hokage and Iruka. . . he would just need to be sneaky about it.

With his plan finalized, and his courage gathered, Naruto put on his biggest grin and took the first step with a confidence he didn’t feel:

“So you don’t really talk to anyone, huh?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> which plot twist surprised you the most? did anything inspire some feels? fav quote? any feedback helps me write!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene is a continuation of Naruto's conversation with the Kyubi from the last chapter. it might be good to reread that part!

Naruto sometimes wished he could drown the monster. He wanted to walk into the cage and skin the mutt alive. He wanted to eat its heart raw.

“I remember my previous container,” it said, and the hate it exuded felt powerful enough to drown in. “I know shinobi. You will be used until broken. Just as you used a poor, desperate creature.”

Naruto felt his anger, the heat under his skin and the sour hate in his stomach, wilt away. Suddenly, he was metal-cold. The world felt unbearably sharp. Water dripped from the ceiling, loud as a bell. Naruto couldn’t feel his face. His mouth was an alien, dull thing. His tongue felt no different from a hunk of raw meat.

Somehow, though, when he spoke, his words came out crystal clear. As defined as an ink stain on paper. As intense as a pang of dull-mirror betrayal.

Quiet.

“You had someone before me?”

Naruto steps forward, and murky water tugs at his clothing.

The monster grins.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

He doesn’t recall what happened after that. For the life of him, he can’t get a glimpse at that missing conversation. He remembered the rush of blood to his head, the roar of anger that blurred his vision to everything except the scarlet flash of the monster’s slit iris. He remembered the impression of heat washing over his face. Like a vat of steam wafting over him. Like a sunburn sinking into his skin.

All Naruto knew was that when he snapped back to awareness, he was inside the monsters cage. On the wrong side of the bars.

He’s inside the demon’s cage, and the monster is restrained with sharp, wicked chains that bind and bite into its fur. The metal glows slightly, and Naruto sees more than he ever had--the outline of large ears, the impression of more limbs fanning out in the dark, the distinctly canine set to the monster’s muzzle. The clawed, humanoid paws.

Naruto was on the wrong side of the cage, and he was safe. Somehow.

The chakra in the air was uniquely powerful--salty and twisted and clean.

And before he can walk any further, Naruto fell though the water coating the floor and gasped back to awareness in his empty, hollow apartment.

He didn’t visit the fox again for a few days. When he did, Naruto refused to speak until he could summon those same rushing chains on command. He By the time he succeeded, the monster was entirely uncooperative.

That was fine. Naruto had his whole life to figure this out.

\--

Surprisingly, the least annoying thing about being pushed into the seat furthest away from Hinata was that Naruto’s newest neighbor was Sasuke. Previously, the extended contact would have made him see red. Now, he had a distinct appreciation for how rarely Sasuke bothered to speak.

The most annoying thing would be that other people seemed to envy his position. The girls in his class were distinctly upset that Naruto had an institutionalized monopoly on Sasuke’s left side. He told them it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. They rolled their eyes.

Naruto scoffed at the thought that the bastard could somehow be such prime real-estate, but he didn’t bother to refute it any further. He didn’t bother with a lot of things lately. Talking needlessly left a poor taste in his mouth. When he started befriending Hinata, he had slowly left behind the impulse to fill the silence. Now, he found it hard to stomach empty conversation with people who didn’t really want to talk to him.

If he wanted to rant, he had a captive audience of one. That’s all he needed most days.

Still, there was the errant impulse here and there to start screaming when the bastard answered a question Naruto failed, or when he snorted quietly at some joke in his head. Naruto swallowed down the urge, if only because he was tired of being the one yelling and yelling at people who didn’t care.

Which was why he doesn’t protest when Iruka asks him to stay behind after class. Naruto prepared himself to ignore some lecture or another. Iruka had a few obvious buttons, and one of them was being ignored. It invariably made him lose his cool.

Instead of a lecture, though, Iruka squinted at Naruto and then nodded to himself.

“Let’s go to Ichiraku,” he said.

Naruto blinked. He bluntly said, “I’m not interested,” before moving to collect his bag.

“You can think of it as bullying me out of my hard-earned paycheck.” Iruka’s eyes narrowed and he raised two fingers. “I’ll get you two specials! With extra pork!”

Naruto twitched, his will power and pride rapidly wising up to the insane mental force which was Instant Gratification. His expression scrunched up into something supremely grumpy. “Three or I walk.”

“Deal.”

“And I want--”

“Don’t push it.”

Naruto couldn’t help but release a startled laugh, especially when Iruka had on his fake-stern expression. Iruka dropped his business persona and he chuckled. “But you can have my share of beansprouts as well.”

The open fondness in that sentence nearly soured his appetite.

On the walk to the shop, they didn’t really talk. Naruto mentioned that the clouds, massive and puffy over the eastern horizon, looked kinda like a bunch of dogs. Iruka looked at the same formation and saw a giant lion. “See? It’s spitting a fire jutsu?”

It was. . . disorienting. He was still angry with Iruka. He knew it. He had been angry that day, and the day before, yet now he couldn’t really get a proper grip on the feeling. It would come, sure. Naruto was never at a loss for anger. But it felt clumsy. Big and empty, like a giant box he couldn’t properly hold as he strolled through the quiet streets of southern Konoha.

It annoyed him. Even as he sat down for ramen, something that should spark an explosion of joy, he just felt mutedly upset. Unwilling to forgive, and unable to be properly outraged. Naruto stared at the halved hard-boiled egg artistically nestled among slices of pork and bok-choy. He pursed his lips and poked at the vivid yolk.

Next to him, Iruka sighed, and he quit jabbering on about some story concerning him and Mizuki back when they were genin. “Look. . . I know you’re upset. I’m not happy either.”

Naruto shrugged. The tip of his chopstick dug into the doughy yolk, gouging out chunks and scattering them over the surface of the bowl.

“Hinata was a good influence on you,” Iruka started, and Naruto felt a flash of annoyance--of course Iruka only cared because he wasn’t as _docile_ , it figured-- “And you were a great friend for her.”

That threw him for a loop. “Ehh?!”

Iruka rolled his eyes. “Yes, _you._ She had a lot more confidence. She was noticeably happier.”

Naruto gritted his jaw, feeling his stomach twist with hurt. “Then why won’t she talk to me?”

“I. . .” Iruka stopped and elbowed him. “Eat your food before it gets cold. I’m not paying for lukewarm ramen.”

Naruto obediently began chewing on noodles, and once he did, Iruka said, “Hinata got in a great deal of trouble for, uh, ‘stealing’ family secrets. Her clan is very powerful.” Iruka scratched at his temple. “Powerful enough to level a serious accusation towards you. And even if the clan head withdrew his suspicions, that doesn’t mean he was happy, nor that he absolved you of blame for the situation.”

“So her dad threw a fit?”

“Hah,” Iruka laughed dully and said, “That’s a way to put it. . . Yes, he asked Hinata’s teachers to keep you separate.”

Naruto jabbed at his noodles; his expression twisted up in frustration. “That’s not fair!” He whipped around to face Iruka. “Can’t you tell him to go to hell?!”

“No.” Iruka’s eyebrows had that little furrow between them, but instead of the deep thought that usually accompanied his expression, he just looked sad. “I’m a chunin, he’s a clan head, and my direct superiors agreed to his request.”

Naruto stared at Iruka for a split second before a wave of anger washed up over his shoulders. He clenched a fist around his chopsticks and ducked his head just so he wouldn’t have to look at that dumb fucking expression on his teacher’s face. Iruka thought Naruto was just fine with Hinata, and that made the idea that he only went along with this bullshit because _someone told him to_ made Naruto angry enough to spit. Iruka didn’t have the guts to stick up for either of them. It wasn’t apathy or a different opinion or even a simple case of ignorance. He thought one thing and did another. He was wrong, and he knew it, and that wasn’t enough. He was--He was such a goddamn--

“Coward.”

Naruto flinched. Iruka was picking at his food, making a single fishcake spin round and round. “’Coward,’” he repeated factually. “That’s probably what you’re thinking. And it’s true. It was cowardly of me to not support you, and it is cowardly for me to abide by a rule which I believe wrong.”

Naruto stared at his teacher. His hunched-shoulders, sad-eyed, trust-betraying teacher. “Then. . . why?”

“Because the cowardly thing, in this scenario, also happens to be the smartest.” Iruka pinned him with an intense expression. This was a lecture, and it had Naruto’s full and undivided attention. “Had I defended you at first chance, the Hyuuga would have argued bias and requested another instructor to be present during the hearing. If I had defended you, I wouldn’t have been in the room. I wouldn’t have been able to testify on your behalf when you truly needed it.”

Naruto recalled the flicker of hope he had upon seeing two familiar faces. It made the guilt he had felt upon raking Iruka over the coals resurge in a spike of nausea.

“Thankfully, you didn’t need my help, so I didn’t have to reveal anything.” He sounded so professional. Like Naruto hadn’t _used_ him as a big part of his emotional appeal. “And, if I were to not follow the orders of my superior, I would be relieved of my duties. Hinata would no longer have a teacher who finds her growth more important than her father’s wishes. And you would no longer have me.” Iruka sighed, and his shoulders slumped. “Naruto. . . I’m sorry.”

Naruto didn’t know what he was feeling anymore.

“It was my duty to report on my class. I would do it again. But you have a right to be angry, especially since I didn’t take the time to explain anything. There was so much happening that week, and you slipped through the cracks.”

“Can. . .”  Naruto licked his lips. The broth must have dried out his mouth. “I still have some questions.”

Iruka nodded. “And I will answer what I can.”

Naruto asked about the limitations placed on genin, and Iruka explained the historical precedents and deaths that made that rule necessary. It made Naruto grit his jaw. “So they had students copying the arrays. And getting hurt.”

“It’s not our proudest history,” Iruka said. “Sealing is complicated, even if it looks simple at first glance. The practice came from senior shinobi not understanding the process, and we paid for it. Even knowing the risks, it was still a popular idea.”

“That’s screwed up,” Naruto stated.

“Regulations,” Iruka said, “are written in blood. It is a rule in place for student safety.”

Naruto narrowed his eyes. “But what makes it less dangerous for genin?”

“Teachers. Sealing is usually taught via apprenticeship or tutorial.” Iruka ordered another bowl of ramen for Naruto, as promised. “And a number of things. More mature chakra control, more diligence.”

“But what about theoretical stuff? Just books about it?”

Iruka nodded. “That is the double-edged sword. The theory in developing seals, or even how they work, is a shinobi secret. It was fine for anyone to copy simple seals, because it takes an impossible amount of dedication to reverse-engineer them. But actual theory is heavily guarded among the elemental nations.”

“So too dangerous to copy,” Naruto summarized, “and too secret to learn.”

“There’s a third problem,” Iruka seemed regretful to admit. “Not many are skilled at sealing. So beyond basic techniques that are necessary in some jobs, it’s very difficult to find more advanced examples of what the art itself is capable of.”

So. . . there was never a chance in hell for it to work.

Naruto huffs and props his chin up with his free hand. He shoves a slice of pork in his mouth. “That sucks. I have a lot of chakra. I just thought. . . I dunno, that it could be something _I_ could do.”

“There’s plenty that you can do,” Iruka argues. He reaches up to ruffle Naruto’s hair a bit aggressively. “ _If_ you put your mind to it! Don’t go off and stop paying attention and then expect to be great on the first try.”

Naruto yelps and jerks away, shooting his teacher a stink-eye. He ignores how warm his face is. “It’s not. . .” He didn’t want to slack off. Sitting still was harder than anything in Naruto’s opinion. But Iruka didn’t get that, and no one else seemed to feel the same, so Naruto shrugged. “I don’t expect that.”

“Well if you’re going to be Hokage, you need to act like it.”

“Eh?” Naruto hadn’t talked about his dream since Hinata had asked him. It hadn’t seemed so pressing. But now he wondered how he could forget about his ambitions when he once could never shut up about them. “Do you actually believe in me,” Naruto asked, “or is this some inverted psychology thing?”

“Reverse psychology,” Iruka corrected. “And of course I believe in you. It’s a matter of applying yourself, Naruto.”

Naruto frowned. “But do you actually think I would do a good job? Because--” Well. Naruto is starting to doubt it. He wanted respect and admiration, and the monster seemed to love endlessly reminding him how out of reach that was. And it was. He was bottom of the class. He used to just ignore that fact. Now it seemed so insurmountable.

“You have an intense sense of justice,” Iruka said suddenly. “You want things to be fair, and you want things to be kind. And that’s what would make you a good Hokage. A good person. But our ability to do unhindered good is proportional to our power--And in comparison to the will of the Hyuuga, I’m weak.” Iruka forced a smile and ruffled Naruto’s hair again. This time, Naruto didn’t move away. “So get strong, alright? Then you can stand up to things that I can’t.”

Naruto was so overwhelmed he dropped into the sewer just so he could breathe. He slapped at his cheeks, pacing aimlessly.

“So--”

“Don’t even start.”

The monster laughed, but it shut up.

Naruto took the time he needed so he wouldn’t start sobbing like some kinda crybaby. He mastered his emotions, steeling himself into someone who had the guts to be what Iruka-sensei imagined. He was gonna be Hokage, damnit! People would look at him, and they would be forced to recognize him. He might have some rough patches, but that won’t make him quit! He tramped down on everything until his eyes were dry and his hands were steady. He was a ninja.

And yet, somehow, when he blinked his eyes open and saw Iruka’s completely sincere smile, Naruto lost all composure. He lunged forward in a vicious hug and dug his nails into the padding of Iruka’s chunin vest and warbled, “What the hell is that kinda talk, dattebayo?! Don’t make me cry over ramen, you bastard!”

Iruka took the snot fest like only a teacher for ten-year-olds can.

Naruto got back to his apartment. He splashed water on his face and drank a few gulps directly from the kitchen tap. Then, with a cursory check to make sure no one was obviously standing in some corner of the room or that the hokage was serenely having some tea at the kitchen table, Naruto reached into the cupboard under the sink and withdrew an old coffee ground canister. The piece of painter’s tape that labeled the can _itching powder_ was peeling at the edges.

Naruto took it to his table (making a note for the third time that week that he _needed_ to glue one of legs back into place), and he unceremoniously laid out the contents on the table: a dozen painstakingly copied water storage seals. He shifted through the curled loose-leaf paper and found the one he had worked with most recently.

“So,” he mumbled to himself, “it is good to know that things blowing up is kinda normal.”

Mostly normal. Not a good sign, but an expected one. Really, that was a weight off his shoulders, Naruto thought as he painstakingly altered a few select symbols on his latest copy. When he completed his alterations and ran his chakra though the array, it became immediately obvious that he broke something. The current of chakra slammed into a blockade, and Naruto aborted the technique before anything could catch on fire.

Naruto grimaced and grabbed his notes to jot down a few new ideas.

An insane amount of dedication, huh? That sounded about right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to the kind soul who broadcasted my fic on reddit! excited to get to get out of the academy in the next chapter.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get a little grim

_You seem tired._

**My neighbors had another screaming match. Loud.**

_What do they fight about?_

**Living in a hellhole. Having kids. The two are related. I wish they would just move out already.**

_My condolences._

**?**

_Sorry, but without guilt._

**don’t worry. does it get loud having a family all live in one place?**

_The compound has a decorum of silence imposed at night. It is supposed to promote contemplation. And act as a security measure._

**that sounds boring.**

_~~It is unav~~ _

_It gets lonely._

\--

Naruto tilted his head and brought the scroll closer to his nose. The scent of old paper tickled his nose.

When he and Hinata first started talking, he would approach them like homework because he understood them to about the same degree. And then just to fill his hours at home. And then because he could hold the pages to his chest and gently hug them when it felt like he might otherwise drip away and become a stain on the floor in his empty apartment.

Now, he read them mostly because they hurt. Like picking at the indentions on his cheeks or talking to the monster.

“What were you going to say?” he muttered, squinting at the crossed-out words. Hinata crossed out a lot of her words at first, but she had slowly dropped the habit. This single phrase, from such a short time before everything went to shit, was odd. Sighing, he picked himself off the floor and tore apart his apartment to find his pocket dictionary. It took a few swears, but he found the right radicals for the incomplete kanji.

Unavoidable.

Naruto frowned and brought his scroll to the kitchen table. Hinata talked about things without ever really talking about them. She had gotten better about it, but she still said the most when she said very little.

Unavoidable. She couldn’t change it. It was something she hated, but couldn’t off-set. Why not just finish her sentence? Why cross it out?

And then Naruto realized that he would have challenged her on it. He would have said that she could make noise. She could cause mayhem. She could force people to change just by being loud and obnoxious enough.

He wouldn’t have understood. Having no one meant he never faced consequences. Not ones he cared about. He could choose his hurts.

Hinata just wanted to minimize hers.

Unavoidable.

She wanted to change. She wouldn’t. And therefore it didn’t bear talking about.

Biting at his lip, Naruto considered the upcoming graduation exam. It was almost a month away. He qualified for this one. He had put in the work and brought up his grades and trudged through the academy with his head down. Some days, he forgot that he had ever made a friend.

Naruto rubs at his cheek.

The students in the year above him were cramming for graduation. Naruto didn’t get the same lessons. He didn’t have to go on the survival outings that the graduating class had in place.

Hinata’s cousin did.

\--

**they give orphans last names sometimes. even if theres no parent. if you dont have a last name its a clear sign that you come from nowhere. then no one wants anything to do with you**

_You don’t think Uzumaki means anything?_

**i will make it mean something. but i don’t think its a parental name. there’s one uzumaki on the memorial stone, but she’s the only one. i think they gave me her name because there was no one else who had it.**

_How did you find her name?_

**The old man. he pointed it out one day. said that I should bring honor to it by being a good ninja.**

_I am often told the same. I think it is a Kohona custom they teach to ninja. If you live to a certain age, you are obligated to repeat it._

**gross. I would probably just tell people to bring dishonor to their names. just to keep life interesting, ya know?**

_~~I think names are often~~ _ _What if she is related to you?_

**the old man could have said so. he didn’t.**

_He could have been understating the matter. Or being subtle for whatever reason._

**I never met her. She’s never met me. Just sharing a name means nothing.**

_But do you want it to mean something?_

**not really.**

\--

 “Come on,” Naruto groaned. “Be mean. Say anything.”

 The monster gave no indication it noticed. Naruto kept nagging for its attention, but it resolutely ignored him and offered no distraction to his big plan.

“You’ll get bored eventually,” Naruto challenged.

The bait went untouched, and Naruto grimaced before he blinked out of the sewer. He fiddled with his old kunai holster. He had used it to carry around his scroll and brushes, and it felt lopsided to wear it again. “Quit stalling,” he whispered to himself. With one final sigh, he wandered through the courtyard. Like he predicted, Hinata was back in her old spot now that she didn’t have to deal with her cousin.

Naruto tossed his scroll in front of her. She tensed, looking up with wide, dull-mirror eyes.

Her hair was shorter. She had a new jacket.

“Hey,” Naruto greeted cheerfully. He gave his brightest grin, baring his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut. “It’s been boring, ya know?”

. . .

“I missed you,” He tried again. “How have you been?”

Without a word, Hinata ducked her head and swayed to her feet.

She walked away.

Naruto took an aborted step after her. “That’s it? It can’t even be a secret anymore? I never wanted to get you in trouble. I’m sorry.”

His scroll lays on the ground, covered in dust. He shouldn’t have minded. He threw it there himself.

“I’m your only friend and you can’t even look at me.”

Hinata didn’t pause as she walks away.

Naruto gritted his jaw. His nails bit into his palms, and he wasn’t really talking to Hinata. The heat spilling out of his mouth is something he learned in the sewer. “Fine. I don’t give a shit.” He turns away from Hinata’s retreating back, he drawls, “Next time you want to help, maybe don’t be so useless that you do more harm than good.”

He leaves his scroll in the dirt.

\--

_Why can’t people be kind?_

**Because other people suck.**

_Girls tease Sakura about everything. Her looks or her intelligence or the way she speaks. Because it isn’t physical violence, there’s nothing to be done. I hate that. It just only breeds more cruelty._

**Sakura rubs it in their noses. She likes being the smartest.**

_You don’t get it. It’s hateful._

**I’m not saying she deserves it. She invites it.**

_It makes a whole environment where no one feels safe._

**it must be nice to feel safe. it must be nice for that to ever be an option.**

_~~You are be~~     ~~Why are you~~   Do you always feel this way? _

**what way?**

_Resentful._

**No. It’s new. I don’t like it either.**

**\--**

He didn’t apologize.

\--

“You feel shame,” the monster noted. Its grin was razor-slick. “Isn’t that quite unusual?”

Naruto blinked. The pipes dripped and hissed. Murky water sloshed around his calves. He swung his arm out in an arc and chains reared up from the water. They slammed into flesh and fur in a whirlwind of metal and iron. They bit into the monster like a pack of wild dogs.

Naruto didn’t have any control. It was nice that something defended him.

The monster screeched in pain and outrage. The pit in Naruto’s stomach shrunk. He no longer wanted to gut himself over being unwanted.

“Everyone can tell that you’re here,” Naruto said as he stalked forward to the bars of the cage. “That’s why they hate me.” He scales the bars to poke and prod at the seal.

He didn’t really believe his words. It just felt good to say.

\--


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the kid figures it out

Moving through the aisles of the grocery, Naruto debated the merits of buying vegetables. Iruka kept mentioning their nigh religious importance. The mythical ‘nutrients’ might help him graduate. However, soft things usually rotted before Naruto remembered they existed.

“Do you know how to cook?”

The monster remained motionless. It hadn’t bothered to speak for two weeks.

“Yeah,” Naruto said dully. “Me either.” He picks out a pepper at random, and then a radish, and then some bamboo shoots. He didn’t entirely know how they would fit together, but he would make something edible. He could just douse it with ramen seasoning and call it a day if he got desperate.

He ambled to the counter, arms piled high with ramen and milk and random vegetables. The line had grown since he wandered in. In front of him, an elderly woman tapped her foot impatiently. Curiously, Naruto leaned around her, precariously balancing on one foot and craning his head.

The customer at the counter was desperately patting at her pockets. “I just had it,” she mumbled to herself. She had quite a few groceries piled into cloth bags. One of the straps had been replaced with braided rope and sewn into the fabric.  “It must have fallen,” she said. “I had it.”

“We’re about to close,” the shopkeeper said.

“Can’t I just check again? I know I walked in here with it.”

“We’re about to close.”

Naruto’s own wallet had grown very plump over the past few weeks. He hadn’t been in the mood for pranks. Grocery hauls that big were a full-day production, but he had enough to cover some of it. Plus, she looked incredibly stressed. Losing money was one thing, but it always compounded into something bigger.

Naruto reshuffled the food in his arms and grabbed Gama-chan. “Hey, miss, I got it.”

The relief on her face flickered to life and died in the span of a second. Her eyes widened in recognition, and she _leaned back_. Like he was contagious. Like he would bite her. “Ah,” She stuttered, “No. That’s alright. I’ll---I’ll figure it out. Thank you.”

“I have money.”

“No,” she repeated, already turning back to the counter with a stiffness in her shoulders. “Thank you, but I have it handled.”

She didn’t have it handled. Naruto wasn’t made of money, but he knew how much of a pain going home without food could be. He often lost track of time and ended up getting takeout on nights where he was supposed to cook. He just wanted to help.

He wanted to help. And everyone wanted to pretend he didn’t exist.

Naruto sneered, annoyance flaring up. “You’re holding up the line,” He said, staring her down as she collected her empty bags. Her eyes were very brown. “I was paying for the privilege of leaving before Mr. Shopkeeper withers up and dies.”

Mr. Shopkeeper glared at him for the disrespect, and the customer blanched, and Naruto whirled away to step back into line, his nose in the air. He ignored the rest of the conversation. He dropped into the sewer and waits out every dirty look and the detached way that people look _around_ him to avoid acknowledging he exists.

He blinked, and the store was nearly empty, and he didn’t feel like paying anything to anyone. But he did. He went home and sliced a pepper into his ramen. It tasted fine.

“No one wants to say it,” He told the monster. He sat cross legged in the water. “They all know. But kids don’t. When I henge, no one can tell. There’s nothing weird about my chakra. But they all know.”

Naruto looks at his hands and tries to see some difference in them. Are his nails too sharp? His veins too green? “How do they know?”

The monster didn’t answer. It didn’t even shift.

So he did something stupid. He wrote everything down. He listed out every possible reason, every detail, every slight. He held the pain each moment brought close to his chest; not to exploit it, but to grow detached to it. To grow immune to the pangs it set off in his chest.

And with it all written down, it hurt how obvious it was.

The sewer in his mind is dim. Green shadows and amber lights. The outline of the monster’s muzzle nearly blended into the background, but Naruto trudged forward though the water for a closer look. He had always thought it looked canine. The paws were more human than animal. The same opposable thumbs. He couldn’t tell how many tails laid hidden.

“What are you?”

The monster in the cage cracks open a single red eye and stared down at him. “You already know.”

Naruto crossed his arms over his stomach and looped his hands into the fabric of his pants. “Why are you inside me?”

“Because you were born to bear my hatred.”

\--

It wasn’t the fox’s fault. That somehow became apparent. Naruto could hurt it and scream and cry, and it didn’t matter because the fox didn’t cause his pain, and it didn’t care about it.

Some form of retribution was in order. Something big. It needed to ruin everyone’s day. It needed to make them furious. It needed to be senseless and destructive and entirely absurd.

Because the old man didn’t deserve to know why Naruto was angry, and neither did anyone else.

\--

He filled an orphanage with mice. Dyed the water of the communal baths red. Painted several important buildings with nonsensical murals. Flooded his apartment building.

He didn’t resist when chunin surrounded him as he laid on the ground atop the Hokage Monument, looking at the stars. “Old man wants to see me?” He asked casually. He stretches out the kink in his neck and runs a bright red hand through his greasy hair. “Wonder why.”

And when the Hokage asked him why--

Naruto answered with more honesty than anyone deserved.

“Why not?”

\--

Naruto stomped into his rundown apartment long past dusk. The street lanterns were lit below, and the crowds were delighting in the balmy spring weather. He didn’t care. He didn’t care at all. He threw himself on his bed and shuddered through deep breaths. He didn’t care about the festivities or how unwelcome he was, because he didn’t _care._ He fell face first into his bed and muffled his scream of frustration into a stained pillow.

When he finally stopped shaking, Naruto swallowed down the raw feeling in his throat and rubbed furiously at his eyes. His stomach rumbled with hunger, but instead of getting up to fix food, he rolled over and stared up at the ceiling. Instead, he pushed down the hurt sinking in his chest, and he willed himself into a quiet point of anger. His skin tingled, and then heated. The sound of the festivities outside, so far away and still so _loud_ , faded away into the hum of water running through pipes. A drip of warm water struck his cheek.

Naruto opened his eyes. Water sloshed around his knees, muddy and clouded. He looked to the battered bars of the towering cage.

Kyubi stared back down at him, bored and disdainful. It rests its chin atop a soaking paw. “You failed your test, loser.”

Naruto clenched his fist. His expression only twitched. Then he raised his palm out in front of him. He swiped it downward, and chains materialized, falling and striking into the water. The instant net caught Kyubi around the throat. It dragged the beast under the suddenly bottomless water.

Naruto waited until he felt a little better. Then he allowed Kyubi to gently float to the surface. He allowed the fox to breathe, to splutter curses.

“My day went great,” Naruto said with a happy smile. “Thanks so much. I finally achieved my dreams. I _owe_ you.” Naruto tilted his head down, and the chains tightened around the kyubi’s throat and muzzle, making the demon yowl in pain. The boy’s sunny expression darkened, and his voice softened. “You hate me that much? You couldn’t let me have a single thing go right?”

He didn’t pass his graduation. In the middle of the exam, his chakra shook and shuddered and his clone, the one he already had so much trouble with, burst apart in an instant.

He failed before he could understand why.

The kyubi hurled curses, and Naruto screamed right back.

“You messed up my chakra! I almost had it!”

The fox didn’t deny it. It laughed, between choking and grinning. “And I never could have tried if you had only left this place alone.”

\--

Naruto left a lot of things alone after that. He didn’t make a scene in class. He took Iruka’s food and the Hokage’s lectures. He stared resentfully at his empty wallet and wrote nonsensical lists of needs for other people to buy, because he wasn’t treating his stipend with respect. Because he needed to learn a lesson. Because he would pour all his time and money and energy into revenge against the whole world, and there wasn’t enough of himself to ever make a dent.

If people found his sullen silences strange, they wrote it off. He talked about as much as Sasuke, and now he kind of understood how the asshole could bear it. He didn’t want to speak to anyone at all. Of course that generally ended up with Naruto hanging upside down from a tree branch, singing, “I’m lonely, I’m _lone_ ly, I’m so LONELY,” in a very cerebral mood.

He had to deal with it, though. He crushed his ugly feelings like they were cockroaches crawling up from the drain. He did his homework and eavesdropped on his classmates and ignored the monster. He took the long way home to visit Ichiraku and soaked up the company like a sponge.

He continued picking at seals. He found the symbols in his pocket dictionary and created a tentative library, substituting in new ones to see what changed. A lot of times he burned his hands or caused the paper to rip apart, but some modifications produced interesting results. Adding a fire symbol in one area heated the water while it was in the seal. Naruto shamelessly used it to heat water for his ramen. It was faster than the kettle, if a bit more tiring.

However, besides that one monumental success, he didn’t make much headway. Most of the time it was a mental puzzle that just bored and frustrated him in equal measure. He could understand how he _wanted_ chakra to flow through the seals. But finding the array that would produce it was nearly impossible.

But only nearly. Sometimes he got lucky.

And three months after his disastrous first attempt at graduation, he made some headway.

Sure, the concentrated jet of water bursting out of the tag broke the ceiling tiles in his apartment. And shot water up his nose with such intensity that he choked for several minutes and thought he might die. And it didn’t turn off until it ran out of water and then subsequently started smoking.

These were all steppingstones to progress, Naruto assured himself as he ripped up the tag. The collateral damage could be fixed.

Now, if only he could make it boiling water.

Naruto considered his aching nose and raining apartment. “Yeah,” He murmured. “Maybe later.”

If he couldn’t prank, he would just need to find something else that made it feel like he was the one cheating instead of being cheated.

\--

The fourth Hokage kind of sucked, Naruto decided. “Defeated the fox,” he muttered to himself as he stirred his cup noodle. “Yeah. It’s _definitely_ defeated.” He wandered over to his kitchen window. He could see the furthest side of the Hokage Mounment if he pressed his cheek against the wall. The fourth Hokage looked like a moron.

“I mean, I’m stuck with it forever,” he told the monument. “So, really, I’m doing the defeating.”

The hokage monument did not see fit to respond to such a stunning critique.

Is he the fox?

Naruto considered it for a split second before discarding the idea. “We argue too much,” he told himself. “And I like ramen, and the it doesn’t, so we definitely distinct individuals.”

Yeah. Shoved into the same body, but definitely not the same.

Naruto stared at the spiky hair and stern expression of a man who died the day he was born. One of the greatest seal masters in the whole village had chosen him as the canvas. Naruto wouldn’t have done that to a baby. No one deserved it. He hadn’t deserved it. It wasn’t fair.

But Naruto was the one despised; and the Yondaime was the one that died a martyr, loved and loved and _wanted_ ; and no one but him really cared about what was fair.

 “I’m better than you,” Naruto declared suddenly. He leaned in against the window, hearing the glass creak. When he was Hokage, when people thought about sealing, they wouldn’t even think of the Yondaime. They would think of Uzumaki Naruto. “People are gonna know it, too.”

And with that, he scarfed down his noodles and got delved into the sewer for the first time in months.

“You said you couldn’t have messed with my chakra normally,” Naruto mentioned. “Why is that?”

The fox sighed. Three months of absence had not made its cold, dark heart grow any fonder. “And here I hoped that I could sleep for a year or several. Are you not filled with terror? Great despair? Existential dread over your place in the world?”

“Nope,” Naruto said. “Just bored.”

“Typical.”

Naruto cracked a grim smile at that. “Tell me why you were able to mess with my chakra and I’ll do you a favor.”

“Your word means nothing to me.”

“I mean,” Naruto reasoned, “Shouldn’t I get a chance to build up some trust? Besides, you don’t really lose anything here.”

The fox rolled its eyes. “You have nothing I want. I have every reason to deny you.”

Naruto sort of wanted to remind the fox that he could drown it at will, but it didn’t seem like it would help. “I could leave you alone,” Naruto offered. “Or I could come back more. I can tell you stories. You can use them to hurt me in the future. Isn’t that fun for you?”

The beast sneered, but it takes a moment to contemplate the deal. “Visit when you wish. Prod at the seal when you wish.” It prowled up to the cage bars and sat, staring down at Naruto from above. “Do not speak unless spoken to.”

Naruto’s expression pinched. “Hmm. . . Give me three sentences to catch your interest.”

“One.”

“Fine,” Naruto agreed, “but I can still scream. Just not at you. Deal?”

The fox scoffed but agreed. It tersely explained, “You weaken the seal containing my power when you interact with me. Disrupting your chakra is only something I can accomplish on the most delicate of tasks.”

Naruto blanched. “So every time I come here, I--”

“Did I say that?” The fox snapped, cutting him off with a growl. “Interacting with me is not the same as blathering away in your own head. Entering the cage required you to pry open the bars. I can only send a fraction of my true power to you. It is nothing but a mild inconvenience.”

Mild inconvenience. Naruto glared at the fox. “You decided my life wasn’t going badly enough? If I graduated, I probably would have left you alone.”

“Are we not made to send the other into misery?” It replied. “Besides, you hardly needed my help to fail. I simply speeded the process along.”

“You’re such an asshole.” Naruto flopped over onto his back and let the warm water soak into his hair. He needed to take a bath. He shouldn’t have gotten himself banned from the bath houses. They were usually pretty nice. “So do you want a story or not?”

Above him, the fox shifted back on its haunches. It stared down with some suspicion, some caution. “Who has wronged you this day?”

“The bastard I sit next to in class,” Naruto said. “I’m thinking about gluing him to his seat. Maybe he’ll get angry enough to pick a fight.”

The fox blinked down at him. “Never have I met a creature so eager to provoke fights it cannot win.” Then with a wave of its paw, it demanded, “Leave.”

Naruto shrugged. “I’ll fill you in on how it goes.”

\--

It didn’t go very well because Iruka clocked him laying down the adhesive before class started. He had seemed so astounded by it, considering Naruto shouldn’t have the money to try anything, but Naruto just laughed it off. The dumbass genin filling out his grocery lists needed to check what they were purchasing.

Even when other students began trickling in to class and balked at the sight of Naruto scrubbing the seat clean with a bristle brush and soapy water, he just grinned.

“I was wondering when you would try something,” Kiba mentioned, his nose tilted into the air. “Better luck next time, mastermind.”

Naruto looked him up and down with nothing but the purest contemplation. “I bet I can prank you before the week is out,” he offered.

“You can try it!”

It felt nice to have pranks that weren’t some grand retribution or loud statement. Sometimes it was just rigging several dozen dog whistles to blow from under desks and inside of walls during class. Hyuuga water storage seals could incidentally be converted into air storage seals by replacing a few kanji and changing the geometry. Narrow the channel, make a vice out of glue and sticks,  send a pulse of chakra along a ninja wire, and boom!

The seals themselves turned to ash pretty quickly once they ran out of air. It drove Kiba insane that Naruto admitted to nothing, and that Iruka only thought Kiba was making excuses.  It had given Naruto a bit of a rush because there was a small chance something would catch on fire. The chance that he would get caught had also filled him with some manic giddiness.

If someone wanted to accuse him of hiding something, they were in for a fucking treat.   

Knowing what he contained had hurt. But knowing hadn’t really changed anything. He just had to roll with it and be the best despite it. If people were scared and in pain, it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t going to agonize over everyone’s feelings--including his own. He had to laugh at something.

“I’m not going to be miserable all the time,” Naruto told the monster. “I hate this, but I don’t hate myself enough to sink into it.”

“Boring,” the fox said with a yawn. “Leave.”

“We could find a way for you to not be miserable,” Naruto offered.

“Leave.”

Naruto took Iruka’s food and listened with half an ear whenever the Hokage wanted to chat. He asked dumb questions and wrote down the answers. He henged into a different person to use the bath houses. He tinkered with seals and got into yelling matches with his classmates and tired his best to beat Sasuke in taijutsu.

His success varied, but he made it work.

\--


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who commented and supported my work these past few chapters! please know that even if I dont respond, I appreciate it so much that you take the time to compliment my writing and tell me how it affected you. I get really busy and overwhelmed, but I read my comments religiously everytime I gear up to write more, so thank you to everyone who added fuel to the fire :D
> 
> and on that note, content warning for graphic injury this chapter.

In the midst of brainstorming for another prank, Naruto considered his tin of water storage seals, pristinely copied and concealed in his apartment. His modifications were rarely enough to last long. They disintegrated pretty quickly. Only his hot water seal could be used more than once.

And then he considered Hinata, who wouldn’t look at him, who told him repeatedly how distinct and dated Hyuuga sealing was considered. . .

“I kind of suck,” Naruto mentioned, the idea circling around his head like an annoying fly. “Not for anything you would find bad, but just by a normal standard.”

“I could find fault in any aspect of you,” the fox assured him, ears flicking in interest. As long as Naruto didn’t rub the beast’s nose into it, the kyubi had some interest in Naruto. It mostly stemmed from sheer, unadulterated boredom that came from never leaving a room, but Naruto wasn’t going to pass it by. Sure, the fox was evil, bloodthirsty, and cruel. It was still Naruto’s only captive audience.

He got bored easily, too.

“I almost want. . .” Naruto blinked and then sighed. He rubbed at his cheeks. “I need to stop sharing things with you. You’re just going to use it to piss me off.”

“Who else would you share with?” The fox shrugged. “Although that is another repugnant aspect of you. My past container left me be. You feel the need to bore me.”

“What happened to your old container?”

“I ate her.”

Charming.

“I think you would be bored _without_ me,” Naruto argued, dropping the subject. Thinking about how the fox ended up inside him just sparked more questions. And then rage over how unfair it was. And no one really cared about what was fair besides him, so it was generally unproductive. “People need to talk. They go insane otherwise.”

“You are a fine example,” It responded. “But I am not a person. Don’t imagine me as one.”

“I guess there isn’t some giant fox culture where you go have tea and eat ramen together?”

“No.”

“Horrible,” Naruto concluded. Then he thought on it some more. Tried to imagine the fox as a itty-bitty baby. It had probably never been _cute_ , but maybe. . . less awful? Smaller? “Did you ever have a family? Or did just spawn out of hell one day?”

The fox scowled. “Don’t be so presumptuous. Leave.”

“Can I ask what ‘presumptuous’ means?” Naruto pleaded dryly.

“No.”

\--

Naruto had made a few developments with his seals. It had been painfully slow going. He lost track of the number of occasions where he had singed his hair or burned his fingertips. However, there was something addictive to the process, like those dumb puzzle books his landlord devoured. The process was interesting, even when frustrating. Naruto would argue that his hobby was much better, though, because when he succeeded, he had a cool new tool.

He could heat water or concentrate it into a jet stream. He could make air currents. He could set things on fire, which wasn’t what he wanted most of the time, but still incredibly cool. And his brush work had gotten a lot better. Not a shocking achievement, sure, but Naruto still blushed when Iruka complimented him on it. 

But the fact remained that Hyuuga seals kinda sucked. Their idiosyncrasies--the rigid form, resistance to change, propensity to self-destruct at the slightest imbalance--had grown more annoying after every experiment.

In comparison, his own seal was practically another language. He still couldn’t write it all down because the sewer was weird and things didn’t always work the way he wanted, but the pure _way_ chakra flowed through it was just so much more fascinating.

He couldn’t keep copying and making little tweaks! He had to strike out on his own! Invent something for himself; quit imitating something that obviously wasn’t suited to it.

He had to try making his own seals. So he got to work.

After flooding his kitchen several times, Naruto had decided to cut out the middleman and move his experiments to his cramped bathroom. The bathtub handled flooding a lot better than his kitchen sink. It also put out fires a lot better than, again, his kitchen sink. And if he needed to poop, he didn’t have to stop working on seals. It was the best possible arrangement.

Naruto opened a scroll across his fold-down wooden tabletop, cross legged on his cool tile floor. He had gotten into the habit of carrying one with Hinata but having something for notes made his life so much easier. He poured over his observations from his last few experiments. There were so many arbitrary rules that seemed to surface over the course of a dozen failed sealing tags. He normally hated arbitrary rules, but sealing rules felt less like demands and more like finding the best escape route. There was something exhilarating in knowing the best way to go.

After rereading his old notes, he tore a sheet of paper out of a bound sketchbook. He had switched to watercolor paper recently, and he liked the texture a lot more. He still had a few practice calligraphy slips for prank tags, but the old man would clock him from a mile off if he acted like he was interested in calligraphy. Painting was less of a stretch, especially after Iruka had practically begged him to start putting his art down on paper instead of walls. And Naruto would agree that watercolor could be fun; giving the hokage hilariously awful portraits and feigning absolute sincerity had been a funny prank. And the old man would never be able to prove that Naruto was just genuinely that bad. 

“So, I guess Earth can go here and some numbers here,” Naruto reasoned as he dipped his brush in an old ink well. Seals were picky about numbers. Mixing evens and odds made things muddy. “And a big circle of space and sky and bowl. An inside button with. . . enter? An outside button with air. . .”

Naruto continued to mutter aloud as he tried to reason out a viable pattern. His first two attempts barely accepted chakra before he sensed a block. Adding more characters didn’t seem to help. However his third attempt produced results.

Excitement flooded through him as his chakra flowed smoothly throughout the pathway. It had few snags, a few twists he didn’t imagine from the symbols, but the pathway spiraled into a closed loop once his chakra saturated the tag. Eagerly, Naruto made a copy in his orange scroll and set it aside.

He could carry all sorts of materials, not just water. He knew storage tags existed, but now he had his own. He jumped to his feet and his old tooth brush, before kneeling back over the tag. Carefully, he placed the toothbrush in the center and channeled chakra to his hand. Holding his breath, Naruto touched the inside button.

The toothbrush didn’t disappear. Instead, the seal turned a bright, vivid red.

Naruto blinked. Then he stared at the space where his fingers used to be. Well, he still had two. He could see that much. His thumb and index finger were still attached to his body. But the others weren’t.

They weren’t on the table. They weren’t on the floor.

His chest hurt. He sagged to the side, elbow propped up on the ledge of his tub. Blood flooded down his arm in sheets, even as he pressed his palm into his chest. He tried to make a fist. It didn’t work.

 “I don’t have a hand,” Naruto mentioned. Pain followed him to the sewer, sharp and bone-deep. But the sewer wasn’t real. It was his hand but not his hand.

“Leave.”

It was his hand, even if he wanted to pretend it wasn’t. “I don’t have a hand,” he repeated. “I don’t have one. It’s gone.”

The fox paused, peering down at him. It looked more orange than usual.

Naruto stared at the absent space where his hand would be. He didn’t bleed in the sewer. It wasn’t bloody. It just _wasn’t._

He couldn’t make hand-signs without a hand. He couldn’t hold a kunai. Throw a punch. Write.

He couldn’t do anything.

The fox shifted, the movement sending shockwaves along the water.  “Come here.”

“It’s gone,” Naruto repeated gently.

The fox stretched its claws through the bars. “Is this the boy who would protect everyone?” The golden light of the sewer heated into something molten. Steam drifted lazily across the surface of the ground water. “You cannot do anything if you remain so weak. Foolish. Unwanted.”

Naruto heaved another breath, but he tore his eyes away from his mangled hand. His bloodless, already healed future.

The fox glared down, pitiless and snarling. “You want so much you cannot have. So _come here_.”

Naruto obeyed. Not with any resolute decision. Not with consideration.

Just with the bone deep need to hear something wanted him at all.

The molten light turned into something tangible. He stumbled into the net of the fox’s claws, sagging against the bars of the cage as heat and hatred and pain swarmed around him, crawling over his body like thousands of roaches. He gagged as hot, viscous air dried out the air from his lungs.

And he knew pain.

He woke with his cheek pressed into the cold floor of his bathtub. The room stank of iron. His clothes were stiff with rust. Congealed red globs stuck to his palms, and he nearly vomited at the jelly-like consistency.

Lurching into a seated position, Naruto blindly lashed out for the faucet and turned on the water. It was cold, but he pulled his uncooperative limbs into the basin and washed the blood off of him. His missing fingers burned with the temperature shock, but he choked down a sob and scrubbed at his forearms.

Except, when he tried to get a look at the damage, when he tried to keep his wounds from reopening, there were none.

His lights buzzed, the filaments burning with the force of a current. Cold water ushered delicate sheets of blood down the drain, looking nauseatingly similar egg-drop soup.

He had all five fingers on his right hand. Not just his thumb and index finger. He had a hand.

He had a hand, and he was so unbearably thirsty that when he lunged to drink from the spewing faucet, he smacked his head against the wall and gulped down enough water to hurt.

\--

His hand was not whole. That much became immediately clear. The skin was pale and sickly and delicate. He could see green, green veins through the surface. Each regrown finger had raised scar tissue around the base. His nails grew into points.

It still couldn’t punch.

That seemed so much more important than any banal question about how or why. The fox had healed him, somehow. Naruto didn’t belabor the point. He didn’t bother speculating on it.

No, he was preoccupied with how the _hell_ he could be a ninja when he couldn’t curl his hand into a fist.

“You have none of the memory associated with the tasks you have done with that hand,” the fox said. “It is brand new. It does not obey you because it does not know how. So teach it.”

“How the hell am I supposed to teach my hand,” Naruto yelled, “when I have school tomorrow?!”

“Ohh,” the fox said suddenly. “I may have an idea. This is, as you might describe it, ‘not my problem.’”

Naruto took a small moment to slap himself over teaching a demon sarcasm by pure osmosis.

Then he went out and got some ninja gloves.

“Yes, I’m very sure no one will speculate why,” the fox drawled. “I’m sure this is the best possible route for concealing your own foolishness.”

“You could have mentioned that before I bought them,” Naruto said, grinding his jaw.

The fox grinned. “It slipped my mind.”

“Asshole!” Naruto flipped off the laughing demon. “What’s your idea, huh?”

The fox tilted its head, teeth still bared in that self-amused way. “And what did you do to conceal it while you left to retrieve these gloves?”

“I used a transformation,” Naruto snapped, “so I could. . .  so I could hide my. . . hand.” His face burned from a sudden embarrassment. “Okay, yeah, so they are kinda useless. But I can’t keep a transformation up all day. I can’t even form the right handseal if it breaks.”

The fox didn’t accept the excuse. “Use one hand. Strike with an open palm. Find a solution instead of screaming at me to fix everything.”

Naruto ducked his head. He did tend to just start screaming inside his own head at any shred of inconvenience. He could have figured it out if he just slowed down and thought about it. But still. . .

“You’re sure I can make it get back to normal?” Naruto felt for his body in the real world. It could walk while he visited the sewer. He could maintain his balance. He didn’t faint every time he wanted to talk. But trying to control his movements from the sewer just felt eerily similar to his hand in real life. Like he should be able to. . . and couldn’t. “If I try? If I work hard enough?”

“I make no promises,” the fox finally said. “Don’t look to me for reassurance.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to all the kind words people wrote about last chapter. Im really glad that this can strike a chord with people.
> 
> also, small retcon about a concept I forgot to add in an earlier chapters. Its nothing major, just about the consequences to Narutos pranks. long story short, the hokage took away his allowance. he has to submit his expenses in writing and pay for a D-rank mission for genin to shop on his behalf.

Naruto rolled with the punches. He doused the seal in water, turned it into pulp, and threw it out with the trash. He spent the rest of his weekend trying to coax feeling into his right hand. It remained numb, unfeeling, and cold. At a few points, he nearly broke down into hysterics because he was positive his fingers were going to rot off of his body.

However, he had to live with it. His transformation worked with only one hand, but just barely. If he didn’t have a better sense of how to coordinate his chakra, he couldn’t have done it. No one noticed anything odd when he returned to the academy. He didn’t write anything down. He gestured with his left hand.

He put gloves on before sparring.

Normally, Naruto grappled his opponents. He grabbed them, shrugged off any strikes, and wrestled them into submission. For obvious reasons, he couldn’t do that. This resulted in him getting his ass kicked several times.

Iruka seemed to think this was an improvement. “I’m glad to see you trying out a different style. You just have to work more on your timing.”

Naruto didn’t want to work on his timing, or a different style, or on trying to regain feeling in his hand. “I always have to work on something,” he said tonelessly.

Iruka blinked, and then swiftly recovered into lecture mode, espousing the benefits of hard work and determination and blah blah _blah._ He would find time to appreciate it later. He just spent the rest of class trying to twitch his fingers.

It didn’t work. He didn’t have a moment alone to reapply the transformation, so he left on his stupid, ugly, scratchy gloves and tried to not rip them off his hands.

As everyone left for the day, Shikamaru asked about them, surprisingly enough. His flat stare didn’t really give anything away.

Naruto thought about how to answer. “I cut off all my fingers and I want to keep everyone from noticing.”

Shikamaru raised a thin eyebrow.

Naruto cracked a grin. “Hah! I just thought they looked cool, dattebayo!”

Shrugging, Shikamaru nodded at the more likely answer. Ino, however, examined them with a critical eye. “At least match the blue,” she groaned. “The orange is bad enough, but navy and black look terrible together.”

Naruto almost snapped that he didn’t care about how it looked. He didn’t want them. He didn’t like them. However, he needed them right now. And he needed to not be weird about it. “Could I dye them?”

Ino squinted and she gestured for his hand. Naruto extended it. “Ugh. You would have to bleach it and then dye it. Not sure if the color would match.”

Naruto considered the process too bothersome. He had more prominent issues than matching colors. “Guess they’ll have to clash for a while.”

\--

“Hey. Fox.” Naruto said. His hand still couldn’t form a fist, much less a handsign. It took hours just to make his fingers remember how to flex. They prickled and flared up with pain at the oddest times. His skin was still too pale, no matter how much he tried to burn it under the sun. “Thank you.”

The fox sighed. “It wasn’t a favor. Do not imagine it as one.”

\--

Naruto hissed as noodles slipped through his chopsticks for the third time. Then he groaned and ran his hand through his hair.

“Any particular reason you can’t use your right hand?” Techui asked.

“I hurt it.” Naruto fumbled with his chopsticks another few times before he managed to successfully consume his pork. “And now I think I just have to do this for the rest of my life.”

Techui gestured over his shoulder with a cooking utensil. “I’m sure it feels that way, but keep your chin up. Ninja training is a harsh business.” He ladled more broth over another artistic bowl and set it in front of Naruto. “That’s why this bowl is on the house.”

Tears sprung to Naruto’s eyes, chasing off the dread hanging over his head.  He swayed in his seat, singing tunelessly, “Ramen, ramen, thank you for the ramen.”

Ayame giggled, and Techui smiled, and Naruto felt less alone in the little food stall.

He hadn’t had the chance or inclination to eat out in a while. After his disastrous graduation and ensuing string of nasty pranks, the old man had suspended his stipend entirely. Naruto had to submit his grocery lists and supplies in writing and pay for the D-rank mission that brought things to his door. It had pissed him off at the time, but it turned out to be surprisingly convenient. It was a lot easier to write down the things he needed and hand off the chore to someone else. He was habitually frugal, so he hadn’t even noticed the extra expense.

After a few months of relatively good behavior, the old man had decided Naruto showed appropriate remorse and had given him some pocket change. Not enough to go and buy gratuitous amounts of paint and glitter, but enough for two bowls of Ichiraku. Naruto had thanked him, of course, but he actually meant it. He missed Ichiraku, but he didn’t want to hang around and mooch without buying anything.

“How has everything been?” He asked between painfully slow bites

Ayame seemed a little thrown off by the question, but Naruto couldn’t imagine why. “Business has been boring without you,” she said politely. She frowned slightly, searching for something more suitable for conversation. “I. . . started writing poetry.”

“Poetry?” Naruto didn’t really know anything about poetry beyond the occasional ones Hinata talked about. “What do you write about? Could I read some?”

Again, Ayame seemed surprised. She didn’t have any work with her. She gave the blandest description possible: “I mostly like writing about nature.”

“But what kind of nature?”

“I guess I like storms,” she finally answered. “They always promise so much change.”

Naruto agreed, in a sense. He never bothered to write it down, but the air felt different before a downpour. The rain always unearthed new scents and covered old ones.

Naruto kept asking questions, interested in this new aspect of Ayame.  Ayame started talking about unusual ways to read kanji, and how she could create a rhythm that mimicked the world she wanted to represent. She talked about how rain against windows could ask a question. How the sky twisted, how people saw themselves reflected into something mutable.

Naruto wanted to read poetry. He wanted to understand. He told the fox about it.

“She kept looking so shocked,” Naruto said. “Which is dumb, because poetry can be cool even if it isn’t a ninja thing. People should talk about it more. I bet she could write a book. Ayame could totally write a book. She should get published and--”

The fox slammed one paw over its ears, face drawn into abject misery. “Please shut up about poetry.”

However, it didn’t ask him to leave. “What’s got you so melodramatic?” Naruto challenged.

“Your ignorance. You aren’t unique for asking questions. That’s not why she was so surprised.”

“Well,” Naruto blustered, “what the hell would you know about people? You eat them.”

The fox ignored that stunning critique. “She was surprised not because someone was interested, but because _you_ were interested.”

“Why wouldn’t I be interested?!” People were interesting! Despite what the fox might think, people did interesting things outside the realm of destruction. And chaos. And pain.

“Because you never have been.”

Naruto blinked. The fox rolled its eyes.

“I have listened to your incessant descriptions of your days for hours. They might have cared about your petty activities, but they didn’t expect you to care in return. You behaved like such a parasite when people showed you goodwill. They probably entreated you out of pity where others would have felt slighted by the disrespect. Now that you aren’t so inordinately self-absorbed, they are rightfully shocked.”

Naruto called the fox an asshole and stormed off.

But it was right. That was such a painful feeling. More painful than the prickles that lit up his fingers in hot pain. Shame grew in his stomach from the fox’s words. It wormed into his thoughts. All the times he talked and talked about only himself.

If he met someone like that, he’d get annoyed. He would call them a pest.

Naruto couldn’t recall ever asking a question about Ayame. He knew so, so little about her not because he didn’t see her often, not because she was uninteresting, but because he never asked. Because he never listened.

Before he met Hinata, he never really like listening.

The next time Naruto saw Iruka, he stared him down for a moment, eyebrows furrowed in deep thought. “How. . . is grading going?”

\--

Sakura, Naruto decided one day, was really pretty. Her eyes got so bright when she was passionate or right about something. She yelled at him over things instead of laughing or ignoring him. She tried to mimic Ino’s cutting sense of humor and wit, but she wasn’t detached enough.

She liked Sasuke, which was a definite strike, but she mostly seemed competitive with other girls.

But more than anything, she _yelled_. She got pissed and said so. She sometimes pretended to be demure or shy, but she really wasn’t.

Naruto didn’t really make much headway with telling her that she was really cool. She didn’t want anything to do with him, in part because it was social suicide. He didn’t like it, but he could understand that. She already got bullied. She already had people. She didn’t need to listen to him.

Still, when Naruto had a question on something, he went out of his way to ask her. She would either answer his question or get annoyed and start yelling. Naruto felt alright with it either way. It was kind of like the play-wrestling he used to watch kids do on the playground. He just whined in return, enjoying the back-and-forth. After hanging out so much with the fox, she didn’t have anything to say that could hurt his feelings.

She said something rude, he mocked her taste in boys; everyone in the Sasuke-fanclub immediately rallied behind her for the sake of telling him off.

It made her more popular. It got him attention. He considered it a win-win situation. The only loser was Sasuke, because he hated the spotlight.

Naruto was pretty sure he got more vicious in sparring on days when Naruto pulled that stunt.

On an unrelated note, Naruto also decided that taijutsu sucked. So did throwing things. Sure, after weeks of pained work, he could hold a cup. An empty cup. A full one still was too much. He could hold chopsticks again. If he positioned his brush weirdly, he could even write.

But it still sucked.

The fox had neither sympathy nor advice. Naruto didn’t want to bother Iruka. The hokage was always so so _busy_.

So Naruto just had to figure it out. Hinata had helped him with taijutsu a few times. Mostly on how to avoid strikes, but the principles weren’t too different. He put more thought into where to hit. He tripped people. He used his legs. He struck with an open palm and guided people off balance and played all sorts of tricks.

It worked mostly because of how unexpected it was. Sure, Naruto wasn’t the fastest, but he didn’t really need to be. He just had to surprise people.

Throwing kunai with his left hand had less of an easy work around. Naruto just powered through until he was passable. That’s all he really needed.

Relearning the basic handseals made him terrified on a daily basis. When his fingers cramped or prickled in response to the work, he felt like he was trapped in his bathroom staring down at an empty future.

“I think I know why we have handseals,” Naruto mentioned to the fox. “No one really ever explained it, and I didn’t really care, but I think I know now.”

“It is a cheap mimicry of true power,” the fox said.

The fox was obligated by pride to say so, and Naruto continued without pause, “I’m pretty sure we. . . mimic the way we want our chakra to form. Like--” and here, he forced his hands into Dog-- “this feels different than any other seal. But not just in my hands. Without really thinking about it, hands can shape the way everything else moves.”

“This seems redundantly obvious.”

“It’s not,” Naruto called back, forcing his phantom hands slowly into different seals. “Because I don’t really _need_ the handseal. I can make my chakra move the way I want, but I have to actively shape it. But when I make a specific shape, its like all my chakra decides to mimic something that happening at the end of my wrists. Without me ever knowing about it.”

“. . . Fascinating.”

“It is,” Naruto agreed. “It reminds me of seals. I think they are basically the same thing.”

The fox bared its teeth. “How?”

Naruto shrugged. “Like, some symbol tells chakra how to move, there’s a sequence of them, and you have an effect. Seals are a bit different because a lot of things happen all at once.” Naruto considered the differences with a furrowed brow, but quickly decided the similarities mattered more. “Yep. Still the same though.”

“I’m sure this is phenomenally useful,” the fox said.

 “Not everything has to be useful,” Naruto shot back. “Sometimes, it’s just nice to know.”

“I’m sure you will--"

“Learn better sarcasm, dattebayo!” Naruto shouted, eye twitching with annoyance.  “You can’t just repeat the same structure over and over! It’s cheap!”

The fox stared down at him, insulted. Then its lips peeled back into a shark-like grin. “I’m sure,” it began sweetly.

Naruto left the sewer in a blink. “Get some originality,” he muttered under his breath. Then he looked down at his meticulous notes on handseals. His fingertips still felt like he was wearing gloves, even though he had hung them out to dry after washing them. He twitched his hand, drummed his fingers against the floor. The beat was feather soft and time-jagged, and he felt frustration rearing its ugly head.

Standing up abruptly, Naruto grabbed his watercolors and sat at his kitchen table. He dipped his pinky in cold water and felt almost nothing. The blank page before him stared judgmentally, before Naruto began recklessly smearing water and green and brown across the page, blocking out shapes and adding in flashes of yellow and red and orange.

By the time he had a somewhat-ugly, muddy portrait of Iruka, he felt better. Naruto used his pointed nails to outline the sharp relief of his scar.

\--

Sasuke didn’t deserve attention. Worse, Naruto considered, is that the boy didn’t even appreciate it. He could do a flawless clone, instant replacement, and suitable transformation. (Naruto’s was better, and anyone who said otherwise was biased.) He was the best at basically everything, and everyone wanted his attention, and he had the personality of a dead bird.

“I don’t get it. He’s such a downer.”

“And you are endlessly charming,” the fox agreed.

“Different standard,” Naruto said. “People don’t like me. They would drink Sasuke’s spit.”

The fox gave a wry snort. “From everything you have said, he seems like an ideal monkey. Few words, great talent. The inverse of you, which is quite tragic.”

“He also doesn’t have a family,” Naruto adds. “You’d think he would lonely, but he just hates people.”

“You also hate people,” the fox said idly. “You just also chase futility.”

“Fuck off,” Naruto clipped out, his mood souring. “I don’t hate people. I hate how they treat me.”

There were so many kind, gentle, loving people in the world, and it sucked that none of them were kind or gentle or loving to him. But he could change that.

“That is a distinction you draw so that you can strive for affection without despising yourself.” The fox propped its chin up on one of its paws, staring at Naruto as he observed the seal. Naruto ignored it, but it just drawled, “Perhaps this boy doesn’t hate. Perhaps he just doesn’t seek love. That’s another ideal trait.”

“If I have to listen to you drink Sasuke spit,” Naruto said, “I will jump off the Hokage monument. You’re better than that.”

“Instead of getting defensive,” the fox argued, “listen.”

“You are trying to verbally stab me,” Naruto mentioned. “We both know you want me to get defensive.”

“Fair. However, my logic has merit. Wanting love invites rejection. Someone who rarely accepts love confers value upon those who are successful in enticing them. Thus--”

“I’m too stupid to focus on your big words and this piece of paper. The paper has priority. Dumb it down.”

The fox growled at the disrespect, but it searched for a simple metaphor. “The highest compliment is a picky eater choosing your food. The most annoying flaw is someone begging for a thing never offered.”

Naruto shrugged. “Okay, that makes sense. However, this picky eater is an asshole. Shouldn’t constantly turning up your nose make all the chefs mad?”

“Now we get into questions of status and hierarchy. Which means I grow bored. What else is there?”

The academy graduation was coming up. And Naruto still couldn’t preform a clone. He could barely pass taijutsu most days without hurting his numb hand. He was slower than ever at handseals.

And the fox would tell him to quit complaining, because none of this was new.

“The old man liked the sunset I painted,” Naruto mentioned. “I would paint you something, but you don’t really exist outside of my head.”

“Are you going to prod at this seal forever?” The fox ignored Naruto’s words and chose to continue poking at him. It was such an _ornery_ parasite. “Do you still fear--”

“Yep,” Naruto said easily. “I’m not touching seals with a ten-foot pole. Well, I’ll touch this one. I’m just not making any.”

“Coward.”

“Pest,” Naruto replied tonelessly. “I know you like it when I hurt myself, but I don’t.”

“I don’t care if you harm yourself,” the fox said. “You don’t bother with trivial details when you are creating seals.”

“How is some random academy student not ‘trivial’ to you?”

“Because it bothers you.”

Naruto snorted in surprise. And then he laughed, an odd warmth filling up his stomach. “You hold so many grudges,” he said over his chuckles. It wasn’t really that funny. And it wasn’t like he could brag about it to anyone. 

The fox gazed down at him, scarlet eyes narrowed in contempt. “You forget how annoying you like to be,” it said.

“Nah,” Naruto argued, “I just--don’t expect you to really _care_ in the long run. It feels like you really shouldn’t mind.”

“If things were as they should be, I would eat you and be done with it. As the case is, we are both stuck perpetually unable to realize our greatest dreams.”

“Yeah,” Naruto agreed as he probed at a new section of the seal. “I’ve always wanted to give someone indigestion.”

This time, the fox snorted in surprise.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Graduation Day Part 1.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> howdy, these notes aren't essential. I just wanna say a few words on commenting etiquette. Im not mad at anyone who has done this, but a lot of authors get really frustrated when someone comments /only/ to ask for an update. It feels discouraging to put a lot of work into a chapter and then have people only ask about the next one. For me, I don't mind people asking about an ETA or a timeline for updates, especially if they have given feedback, but I do get annoyed with only being asked for the next update. However, I'm still not mad at anyone who may have done this. Its something that isn't really a given if you are new to fanfic/have never been an author. Apologies if I have been curt in response to these types of comments, but I hope this explains my actions and is a more productive dialog for everyone.
> 
> enjoy the chapter!

“Naruto,” Sakura bit out, “If you ask me another question, I will hit you.”

Naruto tilted his head in surprise. Normally, Sakura just started swinging. Naruto could sometimes predict that point just judging by how tense her shoulders grew, but more often than not he said something innocuous and she snapped. That was the occupational hazard that came with admiration. Sometimes the people you admire don’t like you back. Sometimes they hate you, or find you annoying, and you can’t really blame them for it. 

However, Sakura’s voice is tight where it should be loud, her head ducked where it should be imperiously raised, and Naruto can’t see why.

“Maa, Saukra-chan,” he complained, leaning back in his class mandated seat, “I _really_ don’t get it. You aren’t good at dumbing it down. Iruka-sensei says you should be able to explain it to a child if you understand it. I thought you would know out of anyone here.”

There. Perfect route for her to call him stupider than a child. Boom. That should cheer her up. He could just call her smart, but that usually just annoyed her. And if she wanted to spar, Naruto wouldn’t say no. Violence isn’t really a stop to interaction. If Naruto can tackle Kiba for being an arrogant asshole, Sakura swat at him for bothering her. It wouldn’t hurt Kiba’s feelings, and it didn’t bother Naruto either.

Before Sakura could respond, Ino slunk up and propped her elbow on Sakura’s shoulder. “Jeez, Forehead. Way to be uncharitable.” She smiled. “I mean, you _are_ top academic kunoichi. Shouldn’t that make you the best at _everything_ , huh?”

Sakura sucked in a breath, her head dropping even further. The bangs kept at bay by her ribbon fell over her face, hiding her eyes. Her mouth was drawn into a tight line.

Naruto glanced back and forth at the two. Ino and Sakura like to yell outright insults. Not trade compliments dripping in condescension. Sakura’s hands shook. Ino’s pale blue eyes had a victorious glint as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

Naruto didn’t like this Sakura, who shrunk back at such a challenge. It made him feel off balance. It made him bare his teeth, it made him glare at Ino, it made heat rise in his stomach. “Wouldn’t you know by being second best?” he taunted.

Ino raised an eyebrow at the challenge. She laughed. “I mean, who could judge that from last place? But this is cute. You two should date.”

Sakura stepped to the side. Ino propped her hand up on her hip, unphased by the sudden loss of her human armrest.

Naruto grimaced, and he wished some stunning, witty comeback would manifest. Something that would sting. He almost dropped into the sewer just to find something.

“God,” someone piped up from behind Naruto, “There’s enough screaming in here already. Those two would be so _loud._ ”

Ino scoffed at the interruption and decided that was enough work for one day.

Naruto wasn’t done with it. “You’re just pissed because all the gossip in the world can’t make you as smart as Sakura-chan!”

“Ouch,” Ino replied easily as she walked back to her seat, “I’ll never go on without knowing the joys of being such a know-it-all.”

Naruto tensed, outrage causing his heartrate to skyrocket. He hadn’t had a brawl with Ino before and he wasn’t sure if he could win, but that wouldn’t stop him. He could at least ruin her stupid hair and her smug face. “Why don’t you--"

“Just shut up!” Sakura shouted.

Naruto flinched back from the venom in her words. He nearly tripped into his seat.

Sakura glared at Naruto. Her face was bright red. “Read the room! Knock it off and quit acting like some gallant hero!”

Naruto swallowed past the sudden lump in his throat. “I was just--”

“Not interested!” She stepped up to his desk, her hands clenched into fists. “I don’t need _you_ to defend me.” Leaning into Naruto’s face, she spat, “You’re such a pest, Naruto. Quit bothering me.”

The classroom buzzed with quiet. Naruto’s hands were loose. He couldn’t find his outrage. It left between one breath and the next, and he didn’t miss it. When he examined Sakura, flushed with fury, contempt making her eyes stark as broken bottle glass, he felt more like he was talking to the fox. He knew nothing about how to make Ino tick. But Sakura wore her anger plainly. She didn’t hide an ounce of it.

Reflexively, he soaked his voice with disdain. As easy as reaching out to pluck a leaf from a tree, he said, “I mean, who else would defend you?” Naruto shrugged and looked past her. “Comradery among pests. But I’m sure yelling at me will make you feel better.”

And of course Sasuke had to walk in, so Sakura didn’t even bother to hit back. She just returned to her seat and didn’t raise her hand for any of Mizuki’s lectures. Not even to ask questions about the upcoming graduation exam.

Naruto couldn’t find it in himself to apologize. Even when the fox smirked at him, even when it mocked him for lashing out at the slightest inconvenience. “Infatuation is so fickle. Isn’t it soothing to return wound for wound?”

“She needs thicker skin,” Naruto replied. He examined the seal and tried not to think about how hard he had to try to form handseals. About how he still couldn’t get a simple clone to work. About how he would never have anyone to come home to.

“You were so enamored with her passion.”

“Ino teases better than you,” Naruto said, “so stick to being all doom, despair, and agony. Besides, Sakura’s still cool. She’s just also mean. You can be both. Plenty of people are.”

“Is this justice?”

Naruto actually considered the question. “It just _is_. Things aren’t fair. Why should I have to be?”

\--

The second time he fails his academy exam, it just felt typical. He glared at Iruka and stalked out, his indignant steps dissipating the fog of his failed clone. The swing set in the academy courtyard was covered with ants, but Naruto brushed the worst of the swarm away and sat down. The bites never hurt him much.

However, watching Hinata as she walked alongside her father makes him want to throw up.

Dropping into his mindscape, Naruto shouts in wordless frustration and kicks at the muddy water. The pipes overhead dripped and rained. The floor didn’t shake.

The fox opened a singular eye. “Can you really not do this elsewhere?”

Naruto slammed his fist into one of the massive bars of the cage in response, heaving for breath. He glowered down at the water, searching for a reflection in the dim light. “I almost had it! If I had just a little more time--”

“I won’t support your delusions,” the kyuubi drawled. A tail fluttered and looped around to rest atop its muzzle, dismissing Naruto from sight.  “You failed. Time wouldn’t change anything.”

Naruto’s head whipped up, his teeth bared. Spiked chains spasmed into existance. Blue and enraged, burning the air like salt in a wound, they struck at the fox.

However, instead of curses, instead of hate, when Naruto met the fox’s gaze, it was wide and shocked. For just a moment. In that split second, before its rage could respond in kind, the fox was afraid. The fox was afraid of him.

Why did he have to respond to every petty insult with rage.

Why was he so fucking angry.

Even in his head, they didn’t sound like questions.

Naruto called back the chains before they could strike. They dissipated in the air like the smoke from his failed clone, but he sensed more twisting like snakes under the surface of the water. They were unsatisfied. They wanted to lash out.

“Just shut up,” he said tightly. He turned away from the cage, from the instinctive urge to hurt, from the fox’s bared teeth and white-rimmed eyes. “I’ll go somewhere else.”

He left the sewer, and the sounds of joy and excitement rushed back. Naruto hunched his shoulders and forces his turmoil into dull pangs of disappointment.

Iruka hadn’t looked pained as he said ‘no.’ He could have at least bothered to look upset. He could have considered it when Mizuki thought he should pass--fucking Mizuki, who was a certified asshole and know-it-all.

Naruto grit his teeth before he stood up, eyes squeezed tightly shut. Iruka could have at least considered it.

And by magic, that seemed to summon him. A hand rested on his shoulder, warm and grounding. Naruto flinched, but he took a moment to make sure his eyes were dry and his face just vaguely pissed-off. “What?” He said harshly, glancing over his shoulder.

And when he doesn’t see a scar, or spiky hair, or an apology, he felt more surprise than warranted. _I need to lower my expectations_ , he acidly reminded himself, _I need to stop being so fucking shocked when he doesn’t care._

Mizuki’s tilted his head and stared at him for a moment. His hand weighed the same as Iruka’s. His stare held the same general sadness. “Hey, Naruto,” his teacher greeted. “Can we take a walk?”

\--

“He is deceiving you,” the fox growled.

“I didn’t ask for your input.”

Naruto sat on the floor in deep thought. He had the Hokage tower blueprints practically seared into his brain, but the best route required consideration. This kind of thing was what Naruto did best--Mizuki had even admitted it.

 _“I’ll be honest,”_ he had said, _“It made you a pain in the ass to teach. However, it’s also how I know you have a chance.”_

Infiltration didn’t really interest Naruto as a profession, but he would do whatever it took to get placed into the ranks. He just had to get in, and then he could fix the rest of his problems.

“You are being used.”

“You’re not my mom,” Naruto called back, considering the various distractions at his disposal. “In fact, I think you ate her. So just go back to sleep.”

The fox huffed, but it fell silent and merely watched him.

Naruto crafted the final outline of his plan, periodically dropping in and out of the sewer to check on the time and gather his materials. The sun cast amber beams of light though his open windows as dusk approached. His apartment was too cramped. Every visual reminder of his heist made him nervous. He climbed up to the roof of his apartment complex and sat down with his feet dangling over the ledge. The metal railing warmed him, still hot from the sun. Someone had lit incense in the street below. Citrus and heady sandalwood wafted out an open window.

“The sky is on fire.” Naruto stared up at the dark ceiling of the sewer. “It’s so orange. That’s got to be a good sign, right?”

The fox said nothing.

“There’s no reason for it to be so orange today and so dull yesterday,” Naruto reasoned. “The old man talked about omens. A white snake is bad luck. So are spider lilies. I don’t see why an orange sky can’t be my good omen.”

And when the fox again said nothing, Naruto blinked back to watch the last dregs of the radiant sunset. He would wait. He could have this moment.

With the sewer, he could have all the moments he needed.

When the world darkened to purple and blue, and the muggy heat from the day slipped into a pleasantly warm night, he dropped back into the water for one last moment to gather himself. It was almost reflexive at this point. It took a second where it once took minutes.

“I do not think fate is in your favor.”

The fox gazed down at him, nose nearly pressed against the bars. It exhaled, long and slow. Its breath washed across the room. “Neither of us are meant to be lucky. We are born from hatred. Fate would cast us out.”

The fox didn’t feel smug or proud. It wasn’t trying to hurt him by dangling something above his head. It spoke plainly. Naruto stepped closer, his chest oddly hollow.  “Then. . . what’s the point, dattebayo? With that bullshit, there’s just no point to living.” He shook his head. “It has to get better. What’s the point of you staying alive if you think you’re just never going to find something better?”

And then, the fox’s scarlet eyes glint in the dark of the sewer. “Because I will outlast fate.” It grins with every tooth, grim and manic in the same smile. “I will rip fate to shreds. As I will with the rest of the world. I can bear being hated because my hatred is stronger.”

Naruto swallowed. The fox’s irises burned, hot and threatening as a stovetop burner. It had spite for longer than Naruto had been alive. Its grins were a promise, same as Naruto’s defiant smiles. This fox could wait. It could be patient. It would outlive everything. It would live on nothing but malice if it had to. The world had confined it. In the face of such a slight, it would rip and kill and slaughter and feel only joy.

“Well, I think fate is lucky to have me,” Naruto snapped, refusing to cower. “And I don’t even know if it exists. So if it keeps you warm at night to think about revenge, fine. But I’ll be lucky at some point.”

Striding forward, Naruto stuck his tongue out and flipped off the giant monster. “And that point is right now.”

And then he stole an incredibly guarded scroll. It wasn’t that hard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to everyone who gave me wonderful feedback last chapter! I appreciate every comment, and I channel all the joy they give me into writing as fast as possible! 
> 
> also not gonna lie, this next chapter will probably hurt


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Graduation Day Part 2
> 
> AKA:
> 
> Mizuki: im about to ruin this whole mans career  
> Naruto: i dont have a job??

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back at it again with the nonlinear narrative and limited perspectives. . . so be prepared to be a little confused the first read through.
> 
> thanks for all the support!

When Iruka dropped into the clearing where Naruto had worked the past few hours, the boy brushed off his pants and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Took you long enough,” he declared. “I was about to fall asleep waiting on you!”

The vein in Iruka’s forehead jumped out. His stern expression twisted the pale slash of scar tissue that ran across his nose. “This isn’t a game, Naruto.”

“I know that!” Naruto set his shoulders and glared at his teacher. “But I passed! Maybe you think I can’t learn some dumb jutsu, but I got it down eventually.”

Iruka examined him with rapidly growing confusion, taking in the scuffs of dirt on his clothes, the unique hazy scent of chakra smoke that hung around the clearing, and the oddly dense quality of nature. “What are you talking about?” he questioned, trying to apply the story of espionage he had been told to the casual, unbothered child in front of him. Naruto had behaved blithely in the face of consequence, but he had no defiance in his eager expression. He didn’t think he had done anything wrong.

Naruto pointed to the Scroll of Sealing propped up against the tree next to him. Iruka had never seen it before, but the ornate emerald paper was glossy in the moonlight. “The graduation exam,” he said. “I learned shadow clone before anyone could find me, so I pass.”

Iruka grew cold. Someone had lied to Naruto. He extended his senses, but the sounds of bugs and nocturnal creatures were overpowering in this section of forest. He needed to get Naruto and the scroll back to the Hokage; he could be in danger. “Where did you learn that from?” he asked, feigning calm he didn’t feel. He waved Naruto forward, keeping one hand close to his kunai in case of an attack.

Naruto looked at him with confusion. “Mizuki-sensei?” he offered. And when Iruka froze in place, Naruto clarified, “He told me all about the alternate exam. I know it’s hard to believe, especially with how badly I screwed up on a regular clone, but I can prove it.” Expression pinching in concentration, Naruto forced his hands into a new signal. A solid clone popped into existence besides him.

Iruka glanced between the two Narutos, his face oddly slack. Certainly not his Mizuki. His _friend_ Mizuki. The boy who taught him how to throw a shuriken since his parents weren’t there to offer advice. The man who covered the tab when academy teachers decided to hit the bar after one-too-many screaming children depleted their patience. His childhood friend, the one who had mellowed out and stopped chasing so many missions as he grew older. “Mizuki.”

It had to be an enemy shinobi. One who decided Mitsuki was the best target to influence Naruto. That was the only explanation.

Naruto didn’t understand his lack of understanding. He took it for disbelief. “Yeah. He believed I could pass, so he set up the test.” Naruto ran a gloved hand through his hair, frustration building. “Agh, this is _pointless_. I got out with the scroll, and you _saw_ I can do a clone, so can we just go find him?”

Iruka’s senses had failed him so many times that evening, but his body moved on pure instinct. He shoved Naruto away. The boy’s clone dispersed from a kunai to the neck. A knife buried itself into Iruka’s thigh. Another half dozen pointed blades sank into his flack jacket.

He tried not to scream, but he did kneel before his wounded leg could give out.  

“No need.” Mizuki landed on one of the tree branches surrounding the clearing. He had his tactical gear adorned. The stress from earlier in the evening, when he barged in on Iruka to deliver terrible news, that Naruto had committed _treason_ , was absent. He wore an alien smile, one without sharp humor or wry kindness. His chakra signature was genuine.

“Good job, Naruto,” Mizuki said. “Now, I’ll be taking that scroll.”

Mizuki had always liked his poisons, Iruka recalled with a sense of dread. He withdrew the kunai from his leg, ignoring the gush of blood that followed. He returned it to Mizuki with prejudice. His friend merely leaned a few millimeters to the side, uninterrupted as he stepped off his perch and dropped to the ground.

Iruka gritted his jaw, his long-unused combat instincts kicking into gear. “Naruto! Run away!” Iruka ordered. “Mizuki used you to steal the scroll. Return it to the Hokage!” Iruka leapt in front of his student, forcing his leg to support his weight. Naruto needed to escape. And he needed to trust that Iruka could protect him. So he stood tall, kunai brandished in the face of Mizuki’s unfaltering calm.

His friend had always liked poison. It meant you only needed a single hit. Then you could simply wait. They were both playing a game against the clock.

Naruto stared at the blood soaking through Iruka’s thigh, shock and horror overcoming his face. Crumpled on the ground, he craned his head to stare up at Mizuki. “You hurt Iruka. . .”

“You should worry about yourself,” Mizuki said as he advanced. He removed one of the giant shuriken from his back, spinning it casually on his wrist. It reflected the moonlight, well-oiled and glinting. “He just wants me to chase you. Then I don’t have time to kill him.” Mizuki paused a few meters away and tilted his head. “I mean, he wants you dead just as much as I do. Don’t you want to know why?”

Iruka stiffened. Mizuki’s blade work was impressive. As usual, though, he forgot his shadows.

Iruka whipped around, throwing himself on top of Naruto. The true shuriken struck his back not a second later, burrowing though the layers of his flack jacket and piercing flesh. Not fatal. Painful, a wound that took him out of the fight, yes, but not a blade buried into Naruto’s unarmored chest.

Mizuki tutted, even as he hefted the scroll of sealing onto his back. His clone dissolved into a puff of smoke. “Really, Iruka? You have your plausible deniability. Just let the little demon die. I’ll even leave you alive.”

Iruka coughed despite himself. He willed himself to think through the pain. He had to protect Naruto. The scroll was secondary.

Naruto didn’t look so shocked any more. The marks lining his cheeks were twisted as he grimaced, his teeth bared and eyes panicked. He looked too young. His voice cracked against everything. “Why would you--"

Iruka wouldn’t let his student die. “He’s lying Naruto,” he pleaded, his eyes watering. Naruto didn’t have anyone to wait for him to come home. Iruka had to be enough. He had to make something better than the loneliness he had suffered. He had to find a way. “His words are all lies. Run away.”

And despite all his worst fears, Naruto responded. He scrabbled away, unwilling but obedient.

Mizuki watched with that same idle smile as Naruto fled.

Iruka, with a burst of determination, removed the shuriken from his back. He nearly collapsed from the pain, but he bore it with harsh pants.

“I’m doing you a favor, Iruka,” Mizuki insisted. He didn’t flinch at Iruka’s single, terribly-aimed kunai. “You’re too weak to avenge your parents. I’m just bringing you some peace.”

“Don’t you dare,” Iruka spat at his friend. Mizuki had no right--no fucking right to appropriate that hurt. He had no right to take this moment to twist the knife in.

Mizuki rolled his eyes. “I have the scroll. I have your death. And Naruto. . .” He snickered. “A shadow clone? He won’t make it far. I’m surprised he didn’t kill himself from exhaustion. Guess it would be too easy for--"

“Shut the hell up!”

Ice water poured down Iruka’s spine. Naruto stood at the opposite end of the clearing. He had another scroll tied to his back.

“What are you doing?!” Iruka shouted. He couldn’t intercept another attack in his injured state.

Mizuki laughed at the scene, unphased. He had planned on hunting Naruto down, but he wouldn’t turn his nose up at a free kill. “I’m not going to fall for some pathetic trick. I have everything right where I want it.” He cracked his knuckles, reaching behind for his second shuriken. “Say, aren’t you curious why everyone despises you?”

Iruka’s head whipped back to Mizuki. Back to his friend, the traitor. “Don’t you dare!”

“You said I lie,” Mizuki argued, “but I’m the only one who will tell him the truth. Come on, Naruto. I have everything I want. I’ll give you the truth for free.”

“Naruto, leave!” Iruka begged.

Naruto stared at the both of them with a terrible, hollow expression. Entranced by a truth, so ready to listen. His chakra rippled in the very air, chaotic and palpable. The blood smeared on his cheek looked black as ink in the dark. He stared, and stared, and Mizuki laughed at his captive audience.

Then Naruto pointed directly at Mizuki and screeched, “You don’t have shit, moron!”

And the scroll on Mizuki’s back dispersed with a puff of smoke.

The chunin’s eyes widened, enraged. He stared at Naruto, who had the scroll hefted over a shoulder. “You little shit,” he breathed, anger turning his boasts into a quiet threat.

“Catch me if you want it,” taunted Naruto. He raced into the woods, rapidly climbing into the treetops.

Mizuki snarled and gave chase.

Panic overtook Iruka. He darted after the two of them, heart racing with fear.

Only to be tackled to the ground by several Narutos.

“Nope,” one said. “You’re super injured. And look terrible.”

“We have to get you to a medic.”

Iruka panted, shock warring with disbelief in the face of these corporeal clones. Naruto. . . he had really figured out such an advanced technique in a matter of hours. He used it on instinct, without him or Mizuki _noticing_ , to switch out the scrolls. He had thought that fast, even when he didn’t have all the details.

His knuckleheaded student had fooled him.

“Don’t worry Iruka-sensei,” a clone said with a wide smile. He held up a roll of bandages and another seamlessly began wrapping the gash in Iruka’s thigh. “We will protect you.”

Iruka wasn’t worried about himself. “That’s not your job,” he insisted.

“But it is our fault.”

“If we had just thought. . .”

“You shouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

“It should have been me.”

“It really should have.”

Iruka glanced between the five clones. None of them had the same expression. The one with a painfully fake smile finished securing the bandaged around his leg. Iruka couldn’t allow this line of thought. Even in a clone, it wasn’t good. “Mizuki was your superior. You should have been able to trust him. You couldn’t have known.”

The fearful one replied, “We should have.”

“And when you came,” Naruto said, his frown tense and his eyes fixed on the ground, “We shouldn’t have--”

The cheerful one elbowed him in the jaw. “Don’t be stupid. We couldn’t have known.”

One by one, the other three picked up the sentence, almost like a meditation, almost like a prayer. “We couldn’t have known,” four of them repeated, jabbering back and forth with slightly different intonations. "We couldn't have known."

The silent one one caught Iruka’s eye. Iruka tensed with the barely restrained fury he found in the clone’s gaze. “We suck,” he spat, and then dispelled.

\--

(Several Hours Earlier)

Of course the first technique he saw had to be the clone jutsu. Of course it did. Naruto nearly slammed his head against the trunk of the tree he rested against. He had to stay hidden until he learned a technique, and _obviously_ it would be a clone. Well, a shadow clone. Naruto read over the technique’s short, dry description. The only difference appeared to be the handseal and the solidity of the clone.

“Agh,” He groaned. “What else is there?” Clones really weren’t his thing.

He rolled out the scroll in front of him, careful not to tear the paper. It seemed durable, but Naruto wasn’t about to fail on a technicality. Breaking a retrieved object would be just the kind of loophole Iruka would dock points on. Naruto scoffed at that, even as he read over the next technique.

Then, he froze. Naruto stared down at the immaculate, densely rendered seal in front of him. _Eight Trigrams Seal._ It looked so strange, and so, so recognizable. When Naruto stretched out an unsure hand and ran a pulse of chakra through the array, it _sang_. Every twist was as familiar as the rhymes he made up as a child. He anticipated every gentle turn and concise loop.

This was the seal that bound the fox to him. Right here. Constructed by Minato Namikaze. The Fourth Hokage.

Jaw tight, Naruto unrolled the scroll even further. Countless arrays stretched out, the ink and penmanship dated and personalized. The language grew archaic. The techniques grew gruesome and obscure.

He couldn’t learn these. The old man wouldn’t let him. Mizuki wouldn’t--Mizuki had told him to learn a jutsu. Not to copy seals. But the scroll itself contained very few jutsu.

Hands shaking, Naruto yanked his orange note scroll out of his kunai pouch and began to copy down the first seal. His seal. He noted every detail in scrawling, messy characters, copying stroke-for-stroke the ones he didn’t understand and paraphrasing the rest. He carefully inked out the seal, precisely mimicking every swoop. He ruined the spiral in the center when his wrist spasmed. Ink smeared across the paper like blood.

He dropped into the sewer. “I found it. Our seal. It’s written down.”

The fox sneered, an irate growl rolling through its massive chest. “No official channel would have allowed you to see it.”

Naruto bit at his cheek. “No,” he agreed slowly, “they wouldn’t.”

The fox snorted, but it held no triumph. Just grim certainty. “It is always the same lie that brings you pain. An ounce of fake kindness makes a fool out of you.” It ran a claw idly against the bars of its cage, musing aloud without any real investment. Naruto flinched at the noise, at the shock of heat and pressure generated by the trespass. “And you will never learn. Acceptance will never come from the mouths that have cursed you.”

Naruto shook his head. Things had to get better. There had to be a way.

“And you will never learn. Any rotting, maggot-filled gesture will make you fall in love with some unattainable dream.

Some people liked him. He could count them on one hand. They--they could care about him. He just had to be hokage--then people would admire him. They would care. They had to.

 “You will never learn. . . and every time, it will be only I who bears witness.”

Naruto dropped to his knees in the water, trying to smother the gnawing ache in his stomach. “I just--I just really--” he breathed, trying to wade through the crashing wave of grief. “He said--”

“They will always lie,” the fox replied. “Lies are what make a shinobi.”

Naruto sobbed. He gasped, and curled up in on himself, and the fox’s words sank into his flesh and seared into his bones. Disgusting water washed over his cheek and soaked into his hair. He nearly drowned in it, except this was the sewer, and nothing really existed the way it should. He wanted to drown. He wanted there to be a concrete reason for his chest to burn and scream with so much pain.

Maybe it was pointless. Maybe being strong wouldn’t change anything. Maybe his future had nothing to look forward to.

But the fox couldn’t know that anymore than he did.

Shaking, Naruto braced one weak arm against the floor and heaved himself out of the water. It clung to him, thick and viscous and colored with rust. He still hurt. He still wanted to lay down and cry.

However, his whole life had taught him that sinking into misery wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.

Naruto sorted with a dozen abstract wants. The smiles that children always prompted from strangers, so long as the child wasn’t _him_. Iruka’s occasional looks of pride and reassuring pats on the shoulder. Ayame’s laughter as he found more and more creative ways to compliment her art. The old man’s praise that made the sun shine brighter. Sakura’s bickering. Hinata’s smile and soft voice and easy friendship.

None of them stuck. They were too nebulous. They required too much from others. They required someone to reach back, and Naruto couldn’t ever control that. No matter how much he wanted to. His thoughts flashed to the seal on inked out on his stolen scroll.

Minato Namikaze. The man who sewed a burden into Naruto’s flesh and died. The hokage universally loved and lamented. A genius, a sealmaster, a martyr. The stone face that stared down over Kohona, watching Naruto’s every step and finding him wanting.

Naruto was better than him. Naruto was better than his man who condemned him to loneliness. And he would prove it.

Naruto stumbled to his feet, clutching at his stomach. Mizuki needed him to learn a technique. Or he told Naruto to do so, and not just immediately find him. So Mizuki needed time before he would find Naruto. And Naruto wasn’t supposed to know what seals were. And if he didn’t know anything about them, then just looking wouldn’t tell him anything. If he just played along with the lie. If he pretended he was too stupid to know better, he could hoard this knowledge. No one would need to know.

He needed time, and ten more hands, and--

Clones. He needed solid, corporeal clones. Naruto’s thoughts raced, and in the sewer he had all the time he needed to reason out his turbulent thoughts. He needed to master a technique: Even if Mizuki’s test was fake, Naruto couldn’t let anyone know he figured that out. He needed something to show he hadn’t bothered with the rest of the scroll. He needed to be stupid and short-sighted and easily fooled. 

As the threads of his plan wove together, Naruto swallowed past the lump in his throat. “Mizuki will try to kill me, won’t he?”

The fox didn’t reply. It seemed put out with him.

“I’m not strong enough to fight off a chunin.” He could barely outrun them, and they weren’t allowed to hurt him. If Mizuki-- _there was no if_! Mizuki had used him. Mizuki wouldn’t leave him to ruin some cover story. Mizuki wanted to kill him. “I’m not--"

“And you never will be if you continue wasting your precious time.” The fox stared down at him. Its fur glittered like hot metal. Its breath filled the room with forge smoke. “Do you not have cunning? Do you not have a goal you have bled for?”

Naruto pushed away the panic building in his chest. “You’re such a rude mutt,” he said shakily.

“And you a petulant fool,” the fox replied with an edge in its raspy growl. “But you will not die.”

Naruto could sob later. He rocketed out of his seal and rolled the scroll back to the first technique. He had a jutsu in front of him. It was the one which had failed him dozens of times before. Naruto knelt and forced his right hand into the demonstrated hand seal.

His middle finger didn’t want to straighten. His pinky wouldn’t bend all the way.

He fought through the pangs that radiated down his wrist and memorized how his chakra swelled throughout his body. And then, like teasing apart a stack of calligraphy slips, he peeled up the afterimage of his chakra into a new form.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final graduation chapter coming up. . . I really shouldn't stretch this out so long but i had FEELINGS about this.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Graduation Final

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohhh boy here we go with one of my favorite pieces of dialog i have ever written. any guesses?

Naruto smashed his foot into Iruka’s head, knocking him out of the air. His ankle ached with the force of his kick, but the pang dulled almost immediately. The weight of the scroll on his back nearly threw off his balance, and he slung it off to the ground.

Iruka looked up at him with shock. “Naruto. . .” he said, his face twitching into anger as Naruto blankly stared him down, “how did you know?” Mizuki released his transformation, shifting into a crouch.

“You said everyone was lying to me,” Naruto said, his face cold. “What do you mean?”

Mizuki laughed. His hook had been for Iruka’s benefit too, but he knew the little demon would be too curious to refuse. It had just waited until there were no witnesses. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so sick. There was a rule created twelve years ago. And it was made to keep a secret that everyone but you knows.”

Mizuki liked to keep his sins private and performative. He understood the desire to appear to be something you weren’t.

Naruto peeled back his lips, baring his teeth. “Knows _what?_ ”

He knew how freeing it felt to shed that false skin. To be born into something true, no longer a servant to circumstance and fickle crowds. No longer restrained and smothered by chasing pointlessly after others’ regards.

“That you are the nine tailed fox.”

Naruto blinked. His expression furrowed.

Mizuki grinned, calculating the path of maximum collateral damage. He wanted the scroll, but not as much as he wanted to see Kohona taken down a notch. It was like defining the trajectory of a throwing knife: the precise adjustments of angle and force made for the most beautiful, ruthless flight. “You are the demon that killed Iruka’s parents. The same which destroyed the village thirteen years ago.” He rose back to his feet, discretely running through a string of hand seals, drinking in the wonderful sight of a broken secret. Of a revealed truth. “Didn’t you find it strange? How cruel eyes followed your every move?”

Naruto gritted his jaw, left hand clasped to the top of the Scroll of Sealing. The scroll shook with the force of his grip.

“That’s why you will never gain acceptance. Why Iruka will always hate you.” Mizuki hid his satisfaction as Naruto’s chaotic, bright chakra signature submerged fully into his genjutsu. It was taking too long to get the little bastard to snap. He didn’t seem to notice as the world around him smeared into patches of monochrome moonlight and shadow. As the ground began to dissolve. “And that’s why no one will weep when I kill you.”

Naruto scoffed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it! It’s all _super_ terrible. But, like, do you know anything _else_?”

Mizuki actually paused as he drew his shuriken from his back. He checked to make sure this wasn’t one of Iruka’s more skilled genjutsu. “You. . . already knew?”

Naruto didn’t bother answering that. “Like, ‘why me?’ And for what reason?” Then he finally looked down and cursed, dropping the scroll in the dirt as he tried to free his legs from illusioned quicksand.

For the first time that evening, Mizuki felt less than satisfied. He glared at Naruto, leveling the last of his massive shuriken. “If that’s what you decide to focus on, then you’re dumber than I even thought. Revenge is right there in your hand. That scroll contains power. Don’t tell me you don’t want to use it.”

Naruto pinwheeled his arms, trying to maintain his balance. “So, you know nothing about _why_?” He asked, a note of fear making his voice shake.

Mizuki made a noise of disdain. Some were too weak to realize their potential. He found it boring that a demon of all things fell into that category. “I know that it doesn’t matter.”

Mizuki flung his shuriken with expertise derived from blood, and Naruto didn’t even see it coming.

\--

It was with a detached distaste that Iruka swiftly dispelled the clones ferrying him away from the fight. They didn’t have time to understand the betrayal, and Iruka swallowed back bile at the feeling of raising a hand against his student. Or perhaps that was just blood, and the wound on his back was going to kill him.

Wounds bandaged, Iruka hurtled through the trees. He eyed every broken branch and crushed foliage, working against the burning spreading through his leg.

He should have tried harder. In the face of Naruto’s temper, his hurt, he had shrunk away. He hadn’t extended his hand enough. Naruto and he were so, so similar, but Iruka had only ever internalized his loneliness. He never understood the glimpse of fury he caught in Naruto’s eyes. He didn’t know how to knowingly bring his hand to a brand.

If Naruto learned a truth poisoned by Mizuki, Iruka wasn’t sure what he would do. And his fear sparked shame, but the shinobi in him had no use for sentiment in risk assessment. Iruka felt his failures mounting up with every heaving gasp for air as he traced through the Kohona forests.

\--

Naruto was made of pain. He stared at the massive blade jutting out of his stomach before he sunk into his seal to escape. Pain followed, as it always did, but he didn’t have to stare at blood and remember being alone and forgotten in his bathroom as he lost a future.

“You’re going to die,” the fox observed idly. It hummed a rolling, bubbling note. “A rather anticlimactic end to your pathetic life.”

And even stunned with pain, even with his shallow breaths and terror coursing through him, Naruto managed to snarl. At this burden he never asked for, at this creature made to send him into misery, he bared his teeth. This fox would gut him give half the chance, and it wasn’t fair that a demon talked to him more than any person. It wasn’t fair, and Naruto would demand blood for blood, hurt for hurt, payment for services rendered because he cared about things being fair and him _dying wasn’t fucking fair._

“I’m not going anywhere!” He stalked up to the bars of the cage, bloodless and weak and proud. He ignored the way the sewer darkened. How he could barely make out the fox’s red eyes and white fangs. “I’m collecting rent. Pay up.”

The fox answered his imperious, furious demand with a wry, delighted grin. “Oh, my little landlord,” it sang, “I suppose I have no choice.”

And Naruto reached through the bars and welcomed the flood of liquid light, and raw fury, and sickening hatred. He drank the sun and it burned his throat. He cupped it into his hands and scooped it into the gaping hole where his stomach should be and felt less hollow. Less breakable, less like wet paper, less like a little child waiting alone in the dark.

And when he woke up to Mizuki’s shock-wide eyes, Naruto ripped the shuriken from his stomach and tasted blood in his mouth. He brought his hands into a simple seal and forced the tidal wave of chakra to commit to his newest jutsu. “Mass Shadow Clone,” he spat, and the whole forest lit up with shouts.

The look of fear on Mizuki’s face was worth every arc of electric pain. Naruto’s hands were shrouded in an orange haze. His nails poked and prodded at his gloves. His skin hummed with a shroud of viscous chakra. “You had your shot,” he reasoned, head lolling as he tried and failed to stand. He laid facedown in the dirt, unable to move further despite the thrumming need to strike. His body wouldn’t cooperate. “So it’s my turn, right?”

But that was alright. He had thousands of bodies now. They all moved in sync to attack. And if Mizuki screamed, and if Naruto found that a little gratifying, that wasn’t something anyone needed to know. Not even the fox.

It was only when his clones began shouting Iruka’s name in surprise and warning that Naruto remembered to cut himself off from the fox’s chakra. It clung to his skin. It made him wish Iruka would notice, just so someone would finally have to face him and admit a truth. The world was in on a secret, and he wanted Iruka to look him in the eyes and explain why.

Through the haze of anger, of the urge to stand and hit something, he recalled Iruka’s look of desperation as he bled for Naruto. As he laid down in front of a blade, knowingly and without hesitation. As he got hurt and only told him to escape.

Naruto lied too. Naruto’s lies had made Iruka bleed. His obsession with knowing, with pretending ignorance, with copying down the scroll of sealing when he should have immediately returned it to the old man had nearly killed them both.

The reminder banished the last of the fox’s chakra, and Naruto just felt exhausted and fever-hot. One by one, his clones dispelled as energy left him, until the clearing was silent and dark.

Iruka plucked him from the ground and cradled his numb body, blanching at the blood soaking his tattered clothes, but unable to find a wound.

Iruka’s lap was warm, Naruto noted. He stank of blood and sweat and fear, but his legs were warmer and softer than the dirt, and Naruto nearly sank into sleep. “You were supposed to go to a medic,” he accused, blinking away his double vision.

“You need it more. But before any of that. . .” Iruka gently took off his goggles and tied his own headband around Naruto’s forehead. Every movement was telegraphed and clear and preformed with shaking hands. He smiled, a little furrow in between his eyebrows revealing barely restrained worry. “Congratulations, Naruto. You deserve it.”

He looked so, so _relieved._

Naruto bit around the shame that flared up from the glowing _pride_ in Iruka’s eyes. Instead, he buried his face in Iruka’s flak jacket and pressed the unfamilliar texture of his headband into his forehead and pointedly didn’t think about his orange scroll.

His orange scroll; hidden in the forest and a monument to the fact that he didn’t deserve anything at all.

\--

In the aftermath, Iruka leaned heavily against his shoulder as they hurried back to the village center by the tentative rays of dawn. A masked shinobi provided a brisk, protective escort. Naruto’s shredded jacket finally surrendered to its wounds, and a rust-soaked piece fluttered to the ground. He stopped to look at the scrap of fabric, just for a moment, before moving on to the Hokage tower. The gathered ninja stared at him with hatred, with suspicion, with barely contained loss, and Naruto stared past them. Iruka wouldn’t let them try anything.

The old man’s hug was warm and tobacco-scented and completely public. Wordlessly, he handed off the Scroll of Sealing to another masked ninja. He eyed Naruto’s new headband and somberly declared this his first mission report, before welcoming him into the tower. It looked different at night. It was so empty you could hear the pipes creak.

Naruto complied wordlessly, glued to Iruka’s side. Even when a medic ninja came and administered medicine and healing, Naruto steadfastly remained by his side. The old man asked questions, Iruka filled in most of the details, and Naruto clarified on foggy bits. And when it got to the part where Naruto had confronted Mizuki, he felt the nebulous desire to give a truth. To see if it would be returned.

“He. . . promised to tell me why everyone hated me.”

Naruto kept his eyes pinned on the ground, but he could hear the way Iruka’s pulse heightened. The hand on his shoulder tightened.

This was a chance for them to say something, but Naruto wasn’t going to force it. He didn’t want to. Speculation was safe. There were no consequences to wondering. But knowing something meant there was a responsibility. And they would ask eventually, once they interrogated Mizuki, and Naruto would deal with that eventuality when he needed to and not a minute earlier.

The third hokage said evenly, “And what did he tell you?”

Naruto didn’t have to fake his hiss of frustration. He pushed all the anger Mizuki gifted him with into a single word: “Nothing.” Nothing Naruto didn’t already know.

And nothing was what the Hokage said. He covered that nothing with platitudes. He praised Naruto for his bravery, his skill, his willingness to protect his comrades. He mentioned nothing about the fox, or why Naruto was chosen, or what Kohona wanted from him, or whether Mizuki _actually had_ anything to tell him. He heaped praise upon praise upon praise--

And for the first time in his life, Naruto was not starry-eyed in the face of it.

He just pretended to be.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> after the emotional turmoil of the last chapters, i figured it was time for something a little more chill! light on both plot and emotions this chapter

In the week following Naruto’s terrible graduation, the suspense wore off by day two. Try as he might, consequences didn’t linger in his mind, and he quickly got over the worst of his anxiety about his looming conversation about the fox by simply having more pressing problems. Like finding a replacement jacket for the one Mizuki ripped apart. Or deciding when it would be look for his scroll, because he didn’t really remember where he hid it in the chaos of that night. Or wondering when his stomach would stop making him regret eating anything at all.

“This is your fault,” Naruto groaned. He had spent forty minutes in the restroom, his entire abdomen aching and burning. “Why can’t I _eat_?” He was hungry! He wanted ramen!

“I regrew your intestines,” the fox said, unmoved by Naruto’s agony. “You’re such an ungrateful brat.”

Naruto slumped. He could nearly feel his pillowcase on his cheek as he curled up in bed. He was miserable, and cramping, and not happy about it in the slightest. “I don’t get sick,” he argued petulantly. “I never get sick. How do I make it stop?”

“You could avoid being stabbed,” the fox offered. “But incompetence is incurable in your case, so the next best thing would be to wait.”

That was unhelpful, but Naruto would have to deal with it until his body quit hurting everytime he tried to drink milk. Although it was a miserable few days, he persevered. He didn’t feel well enough to run around, even when he got so bored, he thought he might explode. Instead, he funneled his energy into preparing for assignment day. He had his full stipend back, although the old man had warned him it would be his last once he started taking missions.

Naruto decided it was as good a time as ever to go shopping. He meandered down to the shopping district, his headband on display. Some people didn’t look very happy about it, but Naruto ignored them. This was Iruka’s gift to him, and he wasn’t going to hide it to make anyone feel better.

Although, he meditated as he strolled around eyeing the shop window displays, it would be a lot easier to do so. A simple transformation, and no one would know it was him. He could ask for help without dirty looks and his pride demanding that he be rude in return. He slipped into a ninja supply store and steadfastly ignored any wariness as he checked out clothing and basic supplies. Much to his dismay, there did not appear to be any of his orange jackets in stock.

“I could get something white and dye it,” he murmured to himself. It seemed like a lot of trouble. And it wouldn’t have his spirals, and he liked the red spirals. He stared at the muted, uninspired collected of dark green, blue, and black active wear with a forlorn expression.

Ino had told him to at least match the blue, Naruto remembered suddenly. He looked down at his hands. He had grown. . . not _fond_ of his gloves but used to them. They made it easier to dig his fingers into tree bark and climb. They protected his right hand from temperature and texture. Even if he had regained most of his feeling in his fingertips, they still occasionally felt full of static, and the gloves helped with the worst of it.  

Even if he didn’t need to hide anymore, he had grown accustomed to the change.

An idea took root in Naruto’s head as he stared at the boring, boring clothes. He bought a black vest that matched the weight of his old jacket and raced home. His stiches weren’t very clean, and he spent over an hour removing the red spiral from the back of his old jacket, but at the end of the day, he something usable. Orange half-sleeves and simple designs on the pockets. He didn’t have to leave everything behind, even if part of his old jacket was ripped beyond repair.

And once he did that, he molded his chakra and peeled _up_. A clone popped into existence with an errant grin, and Naruto took a moment to scrutinize his work. Shadow clones were weird. They reflected all the right light. They even looked like they breathed and blinked. Naruto waved a hand in front of the clone’s face, trying to determine how smart it was. It gave him a weird look and bonked him on the head with its closed fist. “I’m not some freakshow, dattebayo!”

“Hey!” Naruto complained, rubbing at the sore spot. “Don’t be so temperamental at me. Do you remember where we put our scroll?”

“Do you?”

Naruto narrowed his eyes at the jab. “Fair,” he admitted, but he had to resist the urge to punch himself in the face. “But go find it. It’s gotta be somewhere nearby. Don’t bring it back. Just tell me where.”

The clone gave a sarcastic salute and sped off. Naruto glared after it. Chakra constructs didn’t have intestines. Lucky bastard. If Naruto could, he would do it himself. As it was, he would just hurt himself worse. Resting had been helpful

Naruto spawned another two clones. He looked in-between them with a stern expression, trying to quickly determine something that would annoy his errand clone. “We’re playing cards.”

The two clones exchanged a look. “Uh, boss, do you know how to play any card games?”

“Do we even have cards?”

Naruto didn’t have to drop into the sewer to know the fox would certainly be laughing at him. “We will figure it out,” he insisted.

\--

Kakashi decided that Naruto’s apartment was surprisingly neat considering how strangely it smelled. He had cans of garish paint in his bathroom and bottles of cleaning bleach on an old bookshelf. The ceiling tiles in his kitchen had seen better days. The fridge had mildewed at some point and had never been properly cleaned.

“This milk is rotten,” Kakashi idly informed the Hokage before banishing the carton back to the fridge. He sniffed at the air, another odd scent nagging at him. He followed it to the sink and found the faint and acrid scent of old itching powder. It made him sneeze, and he shut the cupboard. He would be on the look out for Naruto’s infamous proclivity towards revenge. Chalk dust was funny. Skin irritation less so.

“I hoped making him buy groceries would improve his diet,” Sarutobi said, keenly observing Kakashi’s investigations. He tested the kitchen table with a steady hand. It wobbled, and the elder man shook his head. “But Naruto is rather neglectful when it comes to simple things. He’d rather not eat than go through the trouble of making a complex meal.”

Kakashi analyzed the various watercolor paintings taped to the walls. They were fairly childish. A few were only half-done. Most of them were simple sunsets, although there were a few plants and one rather unfortunate rendering of the Sandaime. “I’ll keep an eye on that.”

Kakashi wasn’t a cook by any means. He had learned to make rice and eggs after his father committed suicide, and then he nearly killed himself by getting most of his essential nutrients through supplements and soldier pills. He didn’t have tastebuds that were normal in human approximation, but he gamely ate his vegetables with a detached sense of necessity.

Naruto might be the same, now that he considered it. Animalistic chakra did exert odd influences on the young. If nothing else, Kakashi would force feed him healthy food every so often. If the hokage found it a concern, then Kakashi would figure something out. It was his duty. Even if he didn’t imagine it was one he could bear well.

Sarutobi sighed at Kakashi’s noncommittal response. “He responds best to encouragement,” he informed, “and very poorly to punishment. Authority figures have let him down a few times. Be gentle with him.”

Kakashi pushed aside his thoughts of the future. He glanced to the Sandaime out of the corner of his eye as he resumed his search of the apartment. “Should I tell him about the fox ‘gently’ as well?”

Sarutobi laughed at Kakashi’s morbid sense of humor rather than taking it as a sign of disrespect. “If it comes to a head from a simple D-rank, yes. However, I will hopefully take care of that.”

“Hokage-sama,” Kakashi began, “may I ask why you refrained after the Mizuki incident?”

The sandaime hummed at that. His hand wandered to his pipe before he thought better of it. “One part sentiment, two parts pragmatism. Minato’s seal is untested. It responds to emotion and is designed to incentivize the fox’s aid in times of stress.” Sarutobi tutted, inclining his chin towards the shards of a broken bowl that had been left in some corner to gather dust. The scratches in the paint above the remnants hinted at how much force had gone into hurling it against the wall. “And Naruto is quick to anger. I’m hoping he will mellow out with a team to keep him grounded. I also don’t want his budding relationships poisoned by doubt or fear.”

“Or by knowing.”

“He doesn’t need to know,” the Hokage said simply, but with finality. “Mizuki was a traitor, and Naruto acted in self-defense. The seal did everything it was supposed to do, and I will not punish him for not knowing limits while under its influence. Especially since those limits should have never been tested under my care.”

From Iruka Umino’s description, the fox barely had enough chakra to save Naruto’s life. The clones hadn’t shown the signs of demonic influence. They just hadn’t known when to stop without instruction. The boy didn’t know what he had done. By order of the Hokage, neither would anyone else. Mizuki died a traitor to the leaf.

No one needed to know who had killed him.

Kakashi hadn’t inherited an understanding of people alongside his genius. Especially tiny ones. They got so worked up at times. He would take the hokage’s word for it that this was the best course of action. It wasn’t like he wanted to broach the subject himself. “Hai, Hokage-sama.”

Sarutobi stared at him for a long moment. “I know you will have your hands full. . . but take a moment to introduce Naruto to basic fuuinjutsu.” Noting Kakashi’s telegraphed surprise, he specified, “Only simple arrays. If he has some talent for it, we can work with that in the future. However, I don’t think he will have the patience for it, so be sure to prevent any catastrophic errors.”

It was odd to see the hokage pour so much concern into a few words. He seemed more like a grandfather than a leader in Naruto’s kitchen. He trusted Kakashi’s competence enough to assign him the task, but he couldn’t seem to help himself from bringing up basic safety measures.

“If they pass,” Kakashi said. He hadn’t accepted yet. The hokage hadn’t ordered him to pass them. Kakashi would agree he was best qualified to protect Naruto and guide Sasuke Uchiha, but that didn’t make up for the simple fact that Kakashi couldn’t deal with selfish children. It wasn’t in his skillset.  

“They will,” the hokage said. He left it at that, and made to leave by the front door. He paused by his awful portrait and gave a small laugh before moving on. “And when they do, I know they will be great.”

“Impatient and quick to anger,” Kakashi said, testing this idea of Minato’s son and deciding not to comment on Sarutobi’s blatant attachment. He paused by the window above Naruto’s kitchen sink. If he tilted his head just right, he could catch the outline of his old sensei on the Hokage monument. “Not optimal,” he decided.

\--

“I owe you,” Naruto offered to the fox. He sat on the roof of his apartment, running his fingertips over the engraving on his headband. His headband that Iruka, pale and poisoned and bloody, saw fit to gift to him. Naruto had decided to funnel every ounce of guilt into being worthy of it.

The fox bared its teeth. “You did not want chakra,” it challenged, unreasonably wary. Its tails twitched and lashed, rippling in the dark.

“Chill out,” Naruto said, squinting at the demon’s odd hostility. The fox had offered him power during the bell test, in exchange for a favor, and Naruto had refused. The last thing he needed was to lose his marbles in a training ground. Especially around his sensei. Naruto had freedom in ignorance. As long as no one told him about the fox, he had no responsibility attached. As long as no one told him, they would let things slip. “The reality check was still good. I got them to work with me.”

Though, truth be told, the fox’s advice had seemed more poisonous and hateful than an actual offer of help, but Naruto would take what he could get. It was the truth. He was too weak to win alone, and he would be for a long time.

“What did you offer?” it asked, tails slowly drifting to rest.

Naruto snorted at the memory. It had taken a lot of convincing, but once Sasuke got kicked across a training ground and Sakura endured some traumatic illusion, the both of them had been bloodthirsty enough to try working together. “The truth, sort of. I said once we got the bells, we could fight to see who would stay. Then, when we got ‘em, I just made a clone copy and switched out the real one. I stood down and gave Sakura mine, and Kakashi asked if I was sure, and I said I was gonna be the best, and this test wouldn’t prove anything since we were all good enough, and that it was bullshit to ask us to choose, and that--”

“Ah,” the fox said knowingly, “So you rambled until one of them surrendered.”

Naruto coughed in surprise. “No! I _meant_ it!” He gestured widely. “It was a stupid test. Like, I fell for a dumb test once, but this one didn’t make _any_ sense. It was supposed to be about how good we were, but then he gave us the option to divide up the bells by choice.”

“Probably to test your skills in combat against each other,” the fox said. “Or to gauge your resolve.”

Naruto blanched, because he hadn’t considered that. In the moment, he thought he had found a trick question and had just delighted in the chance to be contrary. He shook off the thoughts of what would have happened if he had been wrong. “Yeah, but I still had a backup because I had a bell and Sasuke didn’t. So there, dattebayo!”

“Very underhanded,” the fox approved. “A false surrender is something I didn’t think you capable of.”

“Sasuke’s good,” Naruto admitted. He knew Sasuke was strong, but his taijutsu had been impossible to keep up with. He lit up the training ground in blistering fire. His weapons never missed their mark. And as much as the truth felt like mud in his mouth, Naruto didn’t ignore inconvenient realities anymore. “Like, really good. Better than both of us. But people drink Sasuke-spit, so I figured he would get _somewhere_.”

“So, he failed?”

“Nope. The test was teamwork.”

The fox gave him a dry stare.

“I’m serious.” Naruto scratched at his cheek. “And I think it’s cool. Like, turning your back on your teammates makes you worse than trash. I want--I want that.”

“They would have left you behind.”

“Yeah,” Naruto dismissed, “but they didn’t have time to think it through. Plus, I was going to screw over someone, so there’s no point in getting all righteous. I have a team now.”

The fox peeled back its lips in a rare simple grin. “And did you keep the bell?”

Naruto didn’t quite get the joke it was making at his expense, but that was alright. The fox found a lot of weird things funny. “Ah, after everyone left I just dispelled the clone copy. Kakashi found me like a minute later, and I gave it back without a fuss.”

Naruto had scratched behind his head a gave a sheepish grin. _“Sorry, sensei,”_ he had declared, _“I forgot I kept one.”_ And Naruto hadn’t forgotten anything, and his teacher didn’t look convinced, but Naruto failed to elaborate and left with a jaunty wave.

Yeah, bragging that he fooled Sasuke would feel good, but then Sasuke would always be on the lookout. Naruto had pranks planned, and even if they were just teasing pokes instead of grand gestures, and he didn’t need his teammates to be wary.

His teammates. Naruto felt a smile worm on to his face, and he left the sewer without a farewell. He lept over the side of his apartment railing and hit the ground running. He had to tell his friends at Ichiraku, even if the thought of ramen made him a bit sick. His stomach still didn’t like dense foods. As long as he avoided meat, he reasoned, he probably wouldn’t hurt himself.

Plus, Ayame had gathered some of her work into a small, homemade book. Naruto had been waiting weeks for a copy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and before anyone asks, kakashi totally let them get the bells to see what they would do.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Howdy! Thanks so much to everyone who has supporting me with feedback and love!! 
> 
> on a second note, I should say that ninja training doesn't show up super prominently in this chapter. it is happening, and Naruto is learning, but I'm more interested in what he does outside of that than rehashing the details of any given exercise routine. This chapter is, again, slow and not that heavy.

It was with a heavy heart that Naruto had to admit being a genin sucked. The boring missions, and the learning, and the fact that Naruto had to go over all his basics because Kakashi didn’t like his taijutsu, or his throwing technique, or his replacement jutsu. And their teacher didn’t really explain anything. If Naruto asked how to do something, he just repeated himself with a dumb expression and was overall _unhelpful_. Sakura didn’t let her sweet demeanor slip in front of their teacher, but her expression usually turned thunderous once he left. She wasn’t happy either. And Sasuke seemed pissed off too, but he always seemed that way, so Naruto couldn’t be sure.

Sure, he had gotten better at throwing weapons, and Kakashi had complimented him on being ‘ambidextrous,’ which Naruto was going to assume was a good thing. And Sakura’s punches tended to land a lot more in sparring. The basic genjutsu Kakashi tried to teach them wasn’t the hardest thing Naruto ever learned. Sasuke was as good as ever, but at least he was also miserable while doing odd chores.

Kakashi seemed to just think showing them how to do it once was a good enough demonstration. Naruto did like it more than the academy. There was a lot less bookwork and a lot more focused instruction. However, he had to drop into the sewer several times a day just to keep his temper. He didn’t get things like Sakura or have some astute talent like Sasuke, and he hated having to ask a dozen times for a different explanation, because _No, the first one wasn’t clear._

“You had no trouble with shadow clones,” the fox interrupted, cutting off one of Naruto’s many rants about the subject.

“I definitely had trouble,” Naruto snapped. “It was hard, and took hours, and--”

“--And why should this be any easier?” the fox growled in return. “Did you expect you could relax and have everything handed to you?”

“I’m not slacking!”

“You’re looking to others for guidance. When has that ever helped you?”

Naruto rolled his eyes. “All the time. That’s how people learn.”

“Perhaps _people_ do,” the fox said, “But considering that you are my personal tormentor for hell, we can assume that the same doesn’t apply to you.”

Naruto stuck his tongue out.

The fox narrowed its eyes. “Leave,” it ordered. “Perhaps if you spent half as much time trying instead of complaining to me, you would actually achieve something.”

Naruto felt his skin prickle, and he had to bite his tongue to refrain from speaking. He had the fox had a deal. It asked him to leave, and he would. Naruto asked for help, it would give its poisonous, hateful best.

But in that moment, Naruto nearly set his chains loose like a bunch of rabid dogs. He fled before he could break that truce. Violence was a given between the two of them, but Naruto had to stick to his word. Otherwise it didn’t mean anything.

But he wasn’t slacking.

In the panic of learning shadow clone, he had boiled himself down into concentrate. His whole plan depended on him mastering shadow clone so he would have enough time to take notes on sealing. It was urgent and desperate and painful. He had been focused to a razor point.

But these basic things couldn’t hold his interest, even when he wanted to bang his head against the wall. And he knew he needed to be more focused. He knew he should work harder, do work outside of when Kakashi was there, practice in his spare time. And he also knew that his clothes needed to be washed, and he needed to take a shower, and he really needed to do his dishes, and somehow when everything piled up around him, he just ended up doing nothing.

Naruto looked up at his ceiling. He needed groceries. His fridge didn’t have anything, and he really should save his money. He wanted to get some more paper and ink. And he really, really shouldn’t. . .

Naruto rolled bonelessly off his couch and plopped to the floor with a heaving sigh. Then he picked himself off the floor and headed to Ichiraku.

Ayame was running the shop by herself that day, her hair tied up into a tight bun and her forehead dewy with sweat and starchy steam. Her dad had hurt his back looking for dried mushrooms and needed bed rest until he could see a medic. Ayame started working on his bowl without Naruto needing to say anything. “Of course,” she said idly, rambling as she chopped ingredients, “We aren’t sure when anyone can see him. They said they would send a messenger with their next free appointment, but they warned us their spine specialist was away, so it could be a few days. 

Naruto winced in sympathy. He didn’t like the hospital, but he also healed from cuts and bruises quickly enough that he never bothered to go. There had been a few training sessions where Kakashi sent them over for various scrapes and bruises, and although Naruto usually refused treatment, Sakura and Sasuke were seen immediately. “That’s stupid,” he declared. “What if it’s serious?”

Ayame grimaced, but she quickly busied herself with placing fresh noodles in a bowl. “They don’t think it is. Father is just getting old. And even if it were, it’s not the kind of thing that’s urgent.”

Naruto frowned, but pushing and pushing wouldn’t make Ayame feel better. “Well, _I_ think it’s important,” he couldn’t help but add. “But I hope the old man feels better. Is there anything I can do to. . .” Naruto shut his mouth as his sentence sputtered out, and he nearly cringed. Ayame liked him well enough, he knew, but. . . it wasn’t like he made them popular with his patronage. And she probably wouldn’t want to give him her address.

Hinata had once told him that she liked how he ignored decorum. And while he hated the arbitrary rules that people made up without telling him, he also knew he made people uncomfortable when he did. Even Kakashi, who was nearly as rude as him (and usually on purpose) told him he had to be more professional in front of customers.

And even if he didn’t care about making a lot of people feel weird, Ayame was an exception. Naruto didn’t want to push any boundaries.

Ayame placed a bowl in front of him. She glanced at the darkening sky beyond him and seemed to debate something in her head. “We were supposed to get some fresh pork from the butcher this evening,” she said slowly. “But I know there are a few customers that like to come around in the evening today, and we really could use their business. If you have time, could you--”

Naruto shifted his left hand into a single seal, and guided his chakra into the proper configuration. A clone popped into place beside him. It snapped into a quick bow, before jumping in place. “You got it, boss! Where’s the place?!”

Ayame blinked twice. Then she let out a short laugh and brought up a hand to stifle any further chuckles. She listed off the address for the shop and warned him that it would be a little heavy, and then watched with that same wondering smile as his clone raced away.

Naruto would freely admit that Ayame’s ramen wasn’t as good as her dad’s, but that bowl in front of him was the best thing he had ever eaten.

“You mentioned that you finally got a clone to work,” Ayame said, as if reminding herself. Some of the tension leeched out of her shoulders, and she pulled up stool so she could rest. “I forgot that ninja can do such things.”

“Hah!” Naruto bragged suddenly, glowing with pride. “They can’t. Its a super hard jutsu.” He pointed a thumb to his chest, and bounced in his seat. “You just happen to be a future Hokage’s favorite shop. It comes with perks.”

Ayame smiled again, weary and blatantly humoring him, but filled with so much simple thankfulness. “It certainly does.”

Naruto was so giddy with joy that he thought he might explode. He ordered another bowl just so he would be there when his clone returned with the order, and he talked the whole while. He talked about being a genin, and his new teammates, who were kinda awful but sort of alright at the same time. He talked about how he had managed to nab the demon cat Tora, and how Sasuke had be designated the official carrier because the cat didn’t scratch him, and how Sakura unfailingly waited until Kakashi’s back was turned to glare at him whenever he did something obnoxious, and that Naruto was certain she would one day kill him for being late. He talked about Kakashi’s sorry attempts to teach them some basic genjutsu, which meant that Sakura was the only one who really learned anything useful because Naruto’s attempts were always too ‘heavy’ and Sasuke didn’t bother at all because he would rather practice ninjutsu, and--

“Naruto,” Ayame interrupted as he dug through his wallet to pay for dinner. She had been silent as she sliced pork into thin strips and set it to brine, but when she turned, she had a strange expression, a terrifying hesitance. “Are you. . . alright?”

Naruto blinked in confusion, off-balance. He hadn’t been complaining that much, had he? “Yeah? Why do you ask?”

Ayame opened and closed her mouth several times, trying to perfect her phrasing before she just went ahead and spoke her mind. “You have blood behind your ear,” she admitted. “And your clothes are dirty. Do you have water at your apartment? If not, you could--”

Naruto shook his head, quick and rash. He tried to wave it off. “Nah, nah, I just. . . need to do stuff, I guess.”

“But will you do it?”

Naruto opened his mouth, but he didn’t really know what to say. This wasn’t Iruka nagging him about eating his veggies. Ayame had actually asked him a question, and seemed prepared for any answer, and Naruto couldn’t really give her a genuine response because he didn’t know. He shrugged, feeling some of the stress and mounting frustration he had left behind at his apartment loom over his head.

Ayame nodded to herself. She gestured for him to sit down. “Father is a talented cook. He loves what he does, and he pours his energy into it. And I think you are the same when it comes to being a ninja,” she said, and she crossed her arms. “But father also can’t do some things, even when they absolutely need to be done. And I think you are the same.”

Naruto stared at her, feeling oddly off balance. He hadn’t known that about the old man. He always seemed so efficient while cooking. He virtually never stopped moving. It was hard to imagine him incapable of anything.

“It’s just chores,” Naruto mumbled, grimacing as he looked at his nearly empty wallet. “I can do them. I usually do. I’ve just been so busy and. . .”

“There’s no shame in it,” Ayame declared suddenly, cutting through his excuses. “That is why people live together at all, so we can make up for our limits.” She released a held breath and barreled on, obviously uncomfortable, but just as obviously determined. “Can you make more clones?”

Naruto nodded mutely and fixed his hands into the proper seal. Five clones appeared, filling up the empty seats at the restaurant.

One by one, Ayame singled each one out and gave it concrete chores to do. She wrote down instructions on sheets of receipt paper and entrusted a single slip to each of them, telling one to deal with washing clothes, and another to get stuff done in the kitchen, and another to draw up a bath and put fresh sheets on his mattress. She sent them on their way like they were each him, telling him to be quick and just focus on one thing at a time.

Naruto couldn’t place the strange feeling in his chest. Like he had done something wrong. Like he had been handed something he didn’t deserve.

“I should have thought of that.” Naruto handed over the money for his meal. “Like, that’s really simple. I should have thought of it.”

“When all you have is a blade, you only meet enemies,” Ayame said, quoting some turn-of-phrase that Naruto had never heard. “Don’t worry about what should have happened. It’s getting fixed now.”

Naruto nodded, still unsure of what to do or how to respond. He stared down at his empty bowls.

“How about this,” Ayame offered after a moment. She knocked on his forehead protector with her knuckles, forcing him to quit ducking his head. He met her gentle eyes. “The next time you feel stuck, come here. I’ll tell a bunch of you what to do. Then, by the time you go back home, it will be done.”

“You don’t have to,” Naruto said.

“And you didn’t have to help me,” Ayame said staunchly. “But you did. So, let me do the same.”

Naruto did eventually wander home. Everything was tidy. The kitchen didn't smell like trash. His clothes were hung out to dry, one clone told him. Another shooed him into the bathroom when he tried to go to bed. "You aren't messing up these sheets. Not today, boss." 

When he changed into his pajamas, the sleeves were still a little damp. His living room table wasn't covered in empty noodle cups and his paint supplies or chunks of cushion from his couch. Oddly pensive, Naruto sat down. Then, he flipped one the cushion to his right over and dug out his orange scroll from the inside. 

It was easier to sit down and actually read it, now that everything else had been sorted out. He didn't think he should put it off any longer. 

\--

Naruto’s spent his next day off slacking. No reading, no pranks, no learning. His clones had been in a rush while copying down the scroll, and it showed in the awful handwriting. He could puzzle through it because it was _his_ awful handwriting, but that didn’t make it easy.

Nope, on Naruto’s day off, he took a super long bath. He brushed his hair and sewed up some tears on his clothes. Clones couldn’t do it without stabbing their thumbs and dispelling, but Naruto would have done it himself anyway. The repetitive motion was soothing, even if occasionally a little painful.

Around noon, he packed up a few sheets of paper and threw his paints and brushes into a sack. He wandered around the village at an easy pace, looking for spots that he wanted to try and paint. Nostalgia made him pass by the orphanage, and he could see some kids racing around and hiding in acloves.

He did miss living there, somewhat. He liked his apartment better, but it was empty. There was an unspoken comradery among the unwanted. Even if Naruto ended up taking the blame for a lot of things because it was easy to blame him, the kids there hadn’t really disliked him. The older ones had taken care of him, although he would bet that they were long gone by now.

He didn’t let himself linger, but he did watch the game they played. He recognized some people, the same age or a little older than him, running around.

Naruto would bet he would win any game of tag, but it was a moot point.

He found a spot with an interesting tree, or cool rock, or just a nice view, and he tried to put it down on paper. It didn’t usually look right, but Naruto didn’t let it stop him. He laid on his stomach and let the sun sink into his back. He doodled yellow flowers and grass and put blue clouds on a white sky and just let himself work as the sun drifted across the sky.

“You might want to get easel.”

Naruto flinched and yelped, rolling several yards away with a burst of speed before he realized it was the old man. “That wasn’t funny,” he declared, squinting to show his disapproval.

The hokage chuckled, before raising his hands in placation. “My apologies. I wondered what you were doing.”

Naruto realized he was brandishing his paintbrush like a kunai, and he tried not to blush as he stuck it behind his ear and marched back to his unfinished painting. “It’s my day off.”

“Mine too,” the hokage replied easily. “May I sit with you?”

Naruto considered it. He wasn’t ever on the best of terms with the old man, but he didn’t feel the urge to refuse. He nodded silently, observing him and looking to see if he could spot any other ninja nearby. They appeared to be alone. Unease prickling over his neck, Naruto returned to his unfinished painting.

The hokage sat beside him in a seiza, at first openly watching Naruto paint, and then looking to the surroundings. He didn’t speak.

Naruto realized he was nervous. Did the hokage want to talk about the fox? Had Mizuki told them that Naruto was a liar? Did Kakashi have complaints?

He stared at his work, but he had lost the flow. He couldn’t decide what to add next. He pushed his paper away and thought for a long moment what he wanted to do. He watched the leaves rustle in the trees, casting blue shade over the ground. It was a peaceful place, he decided. “Hey, old man?”

The hokage glanced back to him in acknowledgement.

_What do you want from me? What do you know?_

“What’s your favorite sunset?”

The hokage tilted his head in consideration. “I haven’t thought about it. I suppose red and purple are lovely colors, if common.”

Naruto nodded. He grabbed his bottle of water and sloshed some onto a new page. He worked the water into the paper with a large brush, before layering in different shades of red and purple. “You can blend them if the paper is wet,” Naruto informed him. “And you can use leaves for a cool texture, but I don’t have any.” He left a spot blank for the sun itself, and then fiddled with the background for another few minutes.

The old man just watched.

Naruto let the paper dry out. “You get puffy clouds,” Naruto decided as he examined his work, “because you’re always smoking.” He used his thumb to add on bits of grey and blue, smudging lines and building the outline of something towering on the horizon. His right hand, with its fading, ring-like scars, was still hidden by his glove. He tried to imagine explaining the marks but decided it wouldn’t matter. There was no reason any person would ever need to see them.

“Fair,” the old man said evenly. He hummed after a moment. “You’re getting paint on your shirt.”

_You lie to me. You lie all the time._

Naruto nodded, aware of the slick sensation of paint sliding down the back of his neck. “I forget where I put my brush. It’s easier to just stick it behind my ear.”

“I do something similar when doing calligraphy,” the old man said. “It’s not very proper, and my sensei used to smack me when he saw me doing it, but I bite my brushes.”

Naruto considered this new piece of information. “Did you ever eat ink?”

“All the time. It’s too easy to forget that you need to tilt your head forward.”

Naruto snorted. He decided to quit layering the crowds and started filling in a stylized outline of the Hokage monument. He didn’t want silence right now. So he might as well ask a question or two. “Did you ask Kakashi-sensei to teach us sealing?”

“I hope your interest didn’t fade away,” the hokage said, freely admitting it. “Is it what you imagined?”

Sealing, unsurprisingly, involved a lot of book reading. It also didn’t make much sense, but Naruto was used to that. He had raw determination making it work, and he had actually been able to apply what he learned. Most of his Hyuuga-modified seals didn’t turn to ash anymore. He hadn’t looked at his failed storage tag because the sight of it made him sick, but he could probably figure out where he went wrong with it if he ever got around to it. “Kinda? He said he would help us make a storage scroll next week if we passed a test. So that’s something.”

“That won’t be good for my heart considering the mischief you could make without them, but I am glad you are progressing so quickly.”

“Sakura-chan really helps me out,” Naruto deflected. It was the truth.

Sasuke didn’t give a shit about sealing and tended to just ask for more taijutsu training instead. Sakura didn’t exactly have Naruto’s same determination, but she liked theory better than practice. Her eyes always glinted with a glass-sharp focus when she sat down to read. It was single-minded, but where her single-mindedness translated into kinda terrible fighting due to her temper, with words on a page it became something scary. She would jump rapid-fire between texts and chapters, scrawling notes that made no sense to Naruto, and by the time she even blinked, she would be several steps into some theory or connection that dealt with things Naruto hadn’t even read about yet.

She could usually explain things he didn’t understand or point out that he misread a certain kanji. Sometimes, she even seemed excited to do so, and she would grin with him when he got it. However, her temper also boiled up if he contradicted one of her ideas or didn’t get what she was trying to say, so they usually yelled at each other at least once a day. That was fair. Naruto couldn’t exactly verbalize the things he understood about seals without having an actual seal to show what he meant, so he started yelling just as often.

“She’s probably better at it than I am,” Naruto admitted, not without a little bitterness. As much as he liked the puzzle of seals, and as much as he wanted to excel at them, he didn’t really have a talent for theory and it showed.

The hokage reached out, carefully, and ruffled his hair.

Naruto wanted to shrug it off. He wanted to lean into it. He did neither as he stared at the sun of his painting. He decided he had done enough with this one.

“It is never a shame to have gifted comrades. They cover our weaknesses and compound our strengths. Your team should make you reject complacency and strive for mastery. Are they doing that?”

Naruto’s mouth was dry. “Yeah. A bit.”

“Then don’t worry about who is best and who is worst,” the hokage assured. “Genin are meant to learn, both from their teachers and from each other. I had a former student who perpetually compared himself to others and found his skills lacking. It only ever made him blind to his strengths.”

Naruto turned his head, chewing on his lip. The old man’s bushy eyebrows were drawn into something sad, and he was looking at Naruto’s painting with a far-off expression. Not sad, but pensive. His hair was getting greyer, Naruto realized.

“The young remind us to look to the future so that we may grow.”

He lied. He made a rule that kept only Naruto in ignorance.

“The old compel the young to remember the past so that we may survive.”

He wished Naruto a happy birthday every year. He looked at Naruto without an ounce of hatred or hesitation, even when he was strict, even when Naruto glared and screamed and made himself into something intolerable.

“My teacher liked to talk about trees. The foundation and the leaves. But I find the world itself to be the best analogy. We are all meant to learn, and we are all hungry for it, but if we find only what we want, there will always be gaps in our vision.”

It didn’t balance out. It wasn’t even and it wasn’t fair, and the old man didn’t get to pretend he hadn’t done anything wrong and lecture him like it was something Naruto wanted to hear. It wasn’t something Naruto wanted to hear. He didn’t want to hear it.

“Delight in the recognition of ignorance, Naruto, because that feeling of blindness drives us to reach further towards the heavens.”

Naruto released a breath. And then, without daring to think or examine why, he slumped to the side and leaned against the old man. The paintbrush behind his ear fell into the grass. The hokage tensed, muscle stretched over prominent bone, and then relaxed. Naruto could hear his heartbeat. He could feel the precise current of his chakra. He could feel the places where it was weak. 

His words were full of shit. Naruto could at least remember that. Even if it was spoken kindly. Even if Naruto didn't feel like arguing against the message. It was an excuse for an apology not yet made. And he wouldn't accept that apology, if it ever happened. He wouldn't.

But that apology wasn't coming. Naruto didn't need to reject it. Not in that moment, at least.

Listening to the hum of insects and the slow rhythm of the old man's heart, Naruto didn't consider what was fair, because he couldn't find that it really made a difference. It didn't make him want to leave. It didn't make him want to let go. It didn't make him want to reject this attempt to care, even if he knew the old man wasn't really his grandfather, and never had tried that much to be one.

The old man rested a hand on his shoulder, and Naruto could think of this as a hug if he wanted to, and so he did. 

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before anyone gets upset, I should say that Naruto isn't forgiving Sarutobi, and he isn't forgetting anything either.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the chapter i will probably edit and rewrite the most, but I wanted to post one more chapter before the year comes to a close. Its hard to figure out pacing, but heres where we get some team 7 interactions. they are, predictably, disaster children. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who gave me shoutouts on the Naruto fanfic subreddit! That has brought a lot of new readers and fans to my fic, and I really appreciate it.

\--

Naruto was busy during the day, but his team rarely stayed late. It had taken a few weeks to fall into a simple rhythm of learning. Naruto and Sakura usually worked on sealing texts in the morning while Sasuke did his own thing. Or, if they were feeling lazy, everyone would just sit around and nap. They had about a golden hour where Kakashi showed up and actually taught them something, like shinobi ettiqutte, or various mission protocols, or the symptoms for various poisons. Then a mission or two depending on how efficient they were. They would circle back to training ground seven for an all-out spar in the afternoon.

Those spars were simultaneously the most fun and the most infuriating. They were always over too soon.

Kakashi usually departed with some nonsensical advice after afternoon sparring. “Keep an eye on your depth perception.”

He delivered that advice with the solemnity of sage-age wisdom, but even Sakura had gotten fed up with it after a few weeks.

“What the hell does that _mean_!” Sakura yelled at empty air, brandishing her fist.

Sasuke glared at the swirling leaves like a pissed off cat.

Naruto thought it over in his seal for a minute, and even with the fox sleeping, he decided, “I think we were in a genjutsu?” Naruto looked around, but he couldn’t notice anything odd. Mizuki’s genjutsu had disrupted his vision, but it mostly made him positive that he was sinking into the floor. He waved his hand in front of Sakura’s nose, checking to see if she noticed.

She just looked infuriated by the action. She smacked his hand away and snapped, “Don’t be _rude._ ”

However, Sasuke paused at the edge of the training ground (where he had predictably tried to sneak away) and flared his chakra. He shook his head, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. “I was,” he said shortly. He didn’t want to admit it. “That’s why I kept aiming poorly.”

“Huh,” Naruto considered, poking at a slowly healing cut on his arm. It wasn’t his only injury from Sasuke’s weapons, and Naruto had nearly started a brawl over it. Well, he would have, but Kakashi had just sat on him until he calmed down. That seemed to be Kakashi’s go-to method for dealing with unwanted aggression. Naruto found it funny when it happened to Sasuke. To him, not so much. “I thought you were just trying to kill me with incompetence.”

Sakura squawked at the insult. “If anyone is incompetent here, it’s you!”

Naruto rolled his eyes and threw his hands up in a sarcastic surrender. “Yeah, that’s why that slash in your dress came from me.”

Sasuke’s expression pinched into a glare. Naruto couldn’t decide if his sour teammate was more annoyed with him or Sakura. It should definitely be Naruto. If not, Naruto wasn’t trying hard enough.

Sakura was torn between assuring Sasuke that she didn’t mind and fighting Naruto, but her crush won out. Even if Sasuke ignored her, Sakura’s crush won out against most things, Naruto noticed with growing frustration.

Sasuke ignored her and turned his back on them. He threw a parting taunt over his shoulder. “You make it easy, dead last.”

Naruto narrowed his eyes and decided there was no reason afternoon sparring had to end just because Kakashi had left. With a sloppy hand seal he called up several clones. One appeared directly beside Sakura, and she punched it out of existence on instinct. “Why don’t you come prove it?!” he called, and his clones agreed with him in a chorus.

“Because fighting a wooden post would be more challenging.” However, Sasuke paused. His dark eyes flicked between the clones, sizing up the fight despite his fronted disinterest.

“Oh, sure,” Naruto goaded. He could just rush Sasuke, but the boy was faster than him. And better at replacement jutsu. That was alright. Naruto could be tempting, as long as he knew what made a person tick. “I’ll do you a favor and give you the advantage. You and Sakura versus me. All of me.”

“I mean,” one clone added, “if that’s why you’re too chicken to try--”

“--we’ll make it even,” another tacked on with a bright grin.

Judging by the way two of his clones immediately popped out of existence, Naruto had successfully provoked both of his teammates. He grinned and shifted his left hand into a single-handed seal, testing how quickly he could form his chakra into the proper shape. Not fast enough to produce more clones before Sasuke swept in with his expert taijutsu. It took every lesson from Hinata and every ounce of skill earned from his last semester in the academy, when he couldn’t grapple or strike, to avoid immediately losing.

But Naruto did manage to fire off a single jutsu, and then the battle evened out.

They sparred. And sparred. And sparred. Naruto realized how to blend into his clones, laughing every time Sasuke targeted the wrong one. He would just produce two more, and leap back into the fray.

Sakura quickly stopped trying to stay out of the way and just began playing taijutsu whack-a-mole that Naruto had to quickly learn how to avoid. Somehow, she usually knew which clone was him. Avoiding Sakura was more like a really intense game of tag than a round of hide and seek. Even if she didn’t have Sasuke’s speed, the two of them made a terrifying combination once they stopped knocking into each other.

It felt good to burn through chakra like this. Before the clone jutsu, he hadn’t known anything that could ever make a dent.

At the end of it, his muscles ached, and the fabric of his forehead protector was damp with sweat. His mouth was dry and he might have just stuck his head in the nearby stream if his legs weren’t so wobbly. Instead he breathed laughter where he could afford to, reveling in the feeling of grass poking into his back and the sun scorching his face.

Sakura laid on the ground, sweating and out of breath. Her hair had quickly turned into a riotous mass of tangles, and it fanned out around her like an undignified halo. “How,” she panted, “do you have so much chakra?”

Naruto smiled wryly at that, staring up at the sky. “Just lucky, I guess.” A bird flew overhead, it’s red belly circling the training ground twice before heading south. Naruto rolled over to stare at Sasuke, who’s pride would not let him lay in the dirt, but who’s legs would not let him stand. “Quit using replacement jutsu on my clones, you asshole.”

Sasuke’s face was flushed bright red. He spoke carefully, in between breathes designed to regulate his oxygen intake. “Quit. Spamming. Them.”

Naruto couldn’t keep up his annoyance in the face of such hard-fought pettiness. He just snickered, lying back and falling silent. The clouds looked like nothing in particular. None of this felt like work.

“I want to be hokage,” Naruto said suddenly. A dozen strange motivations swirled about him; a flash of competition and resentment, a need to climb above the looks that never really looked a him, an iron thread of desire and warmth. They were all aimless on their own, but Naruto knew being Hokage would resolve everything bad and strengthen everything good.

Sakura huffed, cracking open a single eye to glance at him. “We _know_ , Naruto.”

“And Kakashi isn’t really helping,” he continued. Sure, he was getting something out of this, but not _enough._ Maybe Sakura didn’t have any stunning ambitions, but Sasuke attacked each day with a ferocity that showed unending resolve. He was going to kill some guy. And he would work his fingers to the bone until then. Naruto couldn’t match that, but he wanted to. “So can we do this? Because I can beat myself up, but it doesn’t really help. And I think it can be helpful for both of you.”

There was a terrible silence, where his hand was extended. Naruto wasn’t sure if anyone would reach back. He kept his eyes fixed on the sky, not daring to seem desperate or afraid. He had to move ahead. And if this failed, he would find something else.

“It is fun getting to hit a lot of you,” Sakura agreed idly, rolling over to her side. Her breathing was less labored, and she had a calculating look. Not a malicious one, but one that was almost absent as she ran through all the details, cataloging and analyzing them with respect to how to move forward.

“Hey!” Naruto heaved himself into a seated a position and pointed accusingly at Sakura. “Don’t be rude! I’m fun to hit individually, too!”

“ _Pointing_ is rude, you--” Sakura blinked several times once she registered what he said. She snorted. Not a dainty or sarcastic one, but a full, loud snort because a laugh wasn’t enough for the situation. Her expression shifted to mortification in an instant, and she whipped a hand up to cover her mouth. Her shoulders curled in, and Naruto watched her mood shift with a sudden sense of horror.

This was nice. He didn’t want to let go of it. This easy. . . not friendliness, but maybe companionship. It was kind of like the fox. Naruto could enjoy it if he didn’t want too much.

“You started it!” Naruto bickered, refusing to react to her unease. “Bastard,” He called out, “is pointing rude?”

“Yes. So is calling me that. My parents were married.”

“How do you know?” Naruto said, picking the most pointless argument he could think of.

It threw both of them for a loop. “. . .What?” Sasuke asked, his face screwed up in something between bewilderment and contempt.

“How do you know your parents were married? Were you there?” Naruto asked sarcastically. “Of course not! So how do you know?”

Sakura choked on nothing but couldn’t seem to bring herself to react beyond that. Her earlier horror remained forgotten.

“. . . This is pointless. I’m not--”

“Fine! But my point still stands.” Naruto jabbed a thumb at his chest. “I’m great for target practice.”

“Not really,” Sakura contested suddenly. She pushed herself into a seated position, slouching and picking at the grass. “We can’t know which hits are fatal or debilitating, since any significant blow is enough to dispel them.”

“But you still have to actually hit me,” Naruto insisted. “Which is different than trying to hit something still.”

“I don’t need your help with that,” Sasuke said.

Naruto nearly read it as contempt, but a Sasuke hadn’t gotten up to leave. “Well, what _do_ you need help with?”

Sasuke didn’t respond immediately.

Naruto waited with a patience he had learned from Hinata. Then, when that didn’t seem to help, he thought about it. Aloud. “You’re good with taijutsu and weapons, so I’m really not helpful for anything technical. But if you need to burn some stuff, I’m more than qualified! Shadow clones don’t feel pain. And--”

“I want to put genjutsu on you,” Sakura blurted out. She nearly winced, but continued on, “Nothing bad. I just need to practice my details and application, and it isn’t useful to try on people who are aware of it.”

Kakashi in a distinct effort to not play favorites, had picked out something for each of them. Taijutsu for Sasuke, sealing for Naruto, and genjutsu for Sakura. Naruto tried his hand at genjutsu, and although he could manage to cast the more open-ended and less specialized one, everyone immediately recognized it.

“And we can call it even when I help out with sealing,” Sakura offered. “Plus, you two would get better at recognizing genjutsu.”

Naruto couldn’t help the grin that broke out over his face. One teammate down.

Sasuke’s dark eyes were unreadable as he examined the two of them. “What do you get?”

“Huh?”

“Out of this. What do you get?”

Naruto thought it over with a shrug. “Clones are kinda hard to organize, so it’s good practice.” With a sudden burst of motivation, a reminder of their old academy days where any sparring session inevitably ended up with Naruto on the ground and Sasuke standing over him, Naruto added with a wide grin, “And I want to beat you.”

Sasuke narrowed his eyes and hummed a short note. With a sigh, he stood up. “Alright. But I won’t stick around if it ends up being useless.”

That was all Naruto could really ask for.

\--

“I’m going to try something weird,” Naruto said to the fox, facing the looming bars of the cage. “Bear with me.” And slowly, he brought his phantom hands into the correct signs for the only genjutsu he could manage.

He had been told repeatedly that his genjutsu was too ‘heavy.’ Naruto figured it would be hard to overwhelm a giant demon, so he didn’t try to tone it down. Instead he imposed an image of the outside world over the sewer--a bright sky, orange and gold and eternally stuck in twilight. He shaped the simple joy and eagerness that made him hang outside his window, breathless, with gravity tugging at his boneless arms and curling his spine towards the earth. If he angled his head just right, if he let his eyes go half-lidded and blurry, the pale ember-light of the sky bloomed in all directions. If he looked long enough, it felt like he was floating in the fire-bright clouds. No earth in sight. Just the pressure on the window-sill digging behind his knees, the blood building up in his head, and the lack of fear in case he fell.

Naruto allowed his memories to swell inside his head, and the sewer glowed in kind: soft and gentle and peaceful.

And the fox even allowed it for a few seconds, before it whipped a tail against the bars and snarled at him.

Naruto snapped out of his trance, whiplash sparking up a headache. He groaned. “What?! That was a nice one!”

“Do not cast illusions against me.”

“It wasn’t _against_ you. It has to be so awful in here! I wanted to spruce things up!” Naruto squinted at the fox, indignant.

“Do not cast illusions.” The fox snarled at him, teeth bared and hackles raised. “Do not.”

“Fine,” Naruto said. He stuck his tongue out and dropped any pretense of charity. “No illusions for you. You can just sit here and rot.”

\--

Naruto had gotten better at managing his emotions. He had. He didn’t glare at people over every petty insult, and he didn’t go screaming to the fox so often, and he didn’t feel it like a knife to the gut on the rare occasions his team passed by Hinata’s. He could breathe through it, drop into the sewer for half a second just to think out loud, and continue on with his day.

But he really shouldn’t have bothered, because being a whiny obnoxious brat had gotten his team their first C-rank mission!

“I can’t believe you got away with that,” Sakura told him. Her excitement was warring with her own disbelief, and the mixture resulted in her skipping and spinning as they walked away from the hokage tower, even as she half-lectured him. “My mother would slap me if I tried that.”

“Which is why I did it, of course,” Naruto bragged, his hands clasped behind his neck. “No mom, no rules.”

Sasuke stared forward, his hands shoved in his pockets and his face perpetually blank. “She will slap you in the afterlife for such disrespect.”

Naruto’s mouth curled into a grin, because Sasuke’s occasional stilted attempts at dark humor were so awkward that they circled back around into being funny. “I have to die first, and there’s someone else in line.”

“Agh, it’s bad luck to talk like this,” Sakura said, her steps slightly wobbly as she stopped spinning. Her sense of decorum and superstition had cut through her giddiness. “Our first mission outside. I don’t want to think about death.”

Sasuke suddenly stopped and glared at the teriyaki stand to his left. “You’re messing with my color perception.”

Naruto nearly stumbled, and he looked around, but didn’t notice anything.

Sakura blushed and averted her eyes. The film over Naruto and Sasuke’s eyes dissolved, and Naruto could detect the sudden absence of Sakura’s light, precise chakra.

“Just changing things around,” she defended, demur but brisk. “What gave it away?”

They began walking again to training ground seven for their pre-mission briefing. Naruto squinted, trying to see if she had layered another over the first, but he couldn’t detect anything odd. He really needed to pay more attention.

“. . . The signs.” Sasuke tilted his chin to the various squares of cloth that hung over windows and doorways to shops along the main road. “The kanji didn’t move in sync with the cloth. The color saturation itself was good, but the effect bleeds over.”

“Well, damn,” Naruto complained, steadfastly looking past a woman who’s expression hardened once she saw him. “Leave it up for me next time.” He wasn’t the most observant, he knew. He was trying to get a little better.

Sakura flashed through a string of seals. Even when Naruto was prepared, he couldn’t feel the moment the genjutsu took effect. He just slowly noticed how reds turned pink and greens turned into blue and how anything orange immediately turned slate grey. Naruto laughed at that, even as he looked around and noticed odd little flowers begin blooming out of the woodwork. A single petal actually brushed against his cheek, but the sensation was more like a fingernail scraping over skin than a flower. “It looks cool,” Naruto complimented, reaching up to grab another falling petal even though he knew it wasn’t real.

“But where is it bad?” Sakura pressed.

“The touch stuff is all wrong,” Naruto admitted. “But the cloth signs look. . . okay, I see what bastard was talking about. Yeah, maybe you just need to cover the whole sign instead? But the color bleeding isn’t that noticeable.”

Sakura dropped the genjutsu with a sigh. “This burns through chakra,” she admitted, “but I like it better than demonic-type illusions.”

“That’s because you’re a control freak,” Naruto said passively.

Sakura smacked him on the back of the head, her nose scrunched up in annoyance. “I am _not_!”

Naruto hadn’t meant it _badly_ (even if it could get annoying when Sakura insisted that she knew best), but his head stung and he felt combative. “Are so! There’s perfectly good genjutsu that let people make up their own problems, but you--”

“They aren’t nearly as subtle,” Sakura began.

“Kakashi is as subtle as a brick, and it still made you faint,” Naruto teased.

Sakura’s face reddened again. “Oh shut up.”

“You would obviously favor the easiest illusions, deadlast,” Sasuke added with a belabored sigh.

Naruto winced, before he spun around and pointed at Sasuke’s stupidly sunburned nose. “Well you don’t know any genjutsu at all, so suck it.”

“Don’t be _crude_!” Sakura snapped. . . somewhat louder than she intended, drawing the attention of several people walking by. She cringed, and continued more quietly, “We are in _public._ ”

Naruto raised his voice to compensate, daring any random stranger to tell him off. “And I am _publicly_ telling bastard he can go suck a lemon, because I know more genjutsu than he does.”

Sakura yelled his name in that low growl that showed she was really fed up, and she told him off for a few minutes before Sasuke bit out, “I don’t need to know any. Once my eyes--”

“You keep talking about your eyes, but they’re as dumb as the day I met you,” Naruto drawled, picking back up the conversation thread immediately. He had learned how to put a bookmark in slow conversations, and Sasuke took nearly as long to talk as Hinata some days. He wiggled his fingers next to his face, gloating over the edge of anger that tightened Sasuke’s jaw. “I have magic eyes. They _see_.”

“Not very well,” Sasuke said, quite tightly, “Because you still think we are on Sunflower street, despite the fact that everyone is staring at us and mouthing the word ‘subtle.’”

Those said people, which were indeed staring at all of them, began melting.

Sakura shrieked.

Naruto blanched.

Kakashi said, airily, “I delight in teaching by example,” and dismissed the illusion.

The three of them were walking over a wooden bridge. Kakashi was stepping on the water below, reading his porn far away from his impressionable students. “Once again, Sasuke is the only one with any situational awareness.”

Naruto’s face reddened at the blatant call out, and he pointedly looked away.

“My cute genin should all strive to be so wise as little, prudent Sasuke-kun.”

Sasuke gave their teacher the deadest stare he could manage, which meant Kakashi hair would have turned white if it could get any lighter. “Our mission briefing. What do we--”

“Oh, yes, yes,” Kakashi acknowledged. “That. Your first mission excursion. I’m so proud.” They reached the other side, but Kakashi remained a respectful distance away. Respectful to anyone’s tendency to draw a knife on him, but respectful all the same. “And, now, with our mission briefing, we shall begin with a lengthy summary on the geopolitical state of the Fire nation and protectorate countries.”

Sakura actually lit up in excitement. “Really?” She asked, hope sparking in her eyes.

“Nope.” Kakashi raised his book and began explaining the supplies they needed to pack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year! The wave arc is here! Unlike with graduation day, I am not going to rehash every event and fight, but highlight some inbetween moments and bring in greater world building! Also, you may have noticed a lot of genjutsu this chapter. . . i swear im trying something thematic, trust me.
> 
> Also, who was your fave character/line this chapter?


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Iruka once told Naruto that studying wouldn't kill him, and Naruto would like to protest. Sakura contemplates the finer things in life. Sasuke busts some heads.
> 
> Wave Arc begins, with some minor deviations.

Once Kakashi deemed team seven thoroughly prepared, he dismissed them. Well, he dismissed them, and then two members were allowed to go home to pack. Naruto was asked to stay behind. And then to go to the Hokage tower.

And then he was told a very big secret that he had known for years.

“And that is the truth of October tenth,” the hokage concluded solemnly. “You saved us that night.”

Naruto blinked, and he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He didn’t know what he wanted to feel. He dropped into the sewer almost thoughtlessly, and kicked at the muddy water. “Hey. Did you know that I am the jinchuriki of the nine tailed fox?”

The demon opened an eye, boredom rapidly shifting into sardonic interest. “I had no clue. Who told you?”

“The old man.” Naruto huffed, bitterness forming in his mouth. “Who else?” He asked sarcastically.

“Do you want to gut him?”

Naruto shrugged, not willing to actually consider the question. “He’s old. He would taste bad, I bet.” He shoved his resentment to the side. At least for now. Naruto opened his eyes and stared at the hokage. “You couldn’t have told me earlier?”

Iruka didn’t wince, but it was close.

And there were excuses made, but Naruto couldn’t bring himself to throw a fit about them. Some of them even made sense, and he didn’t like it, so he just ignored all of them. He threw away the explanations, and the apologies that didn’t change anything. He ruthlessly criticized the way his stomach twisted with sympathy; even if he didn’t believe the old man, his emotions couldn’t help but swell in response to such raw _regret._

“But above all, Naruto, you are not the Nine-Tails.” The hokage shook his head, sadness dragging at the crags of his face. “People are afraid. Plagued by loss. Haunted by a calamity that had no explanation and no resolution, which stole so much--”

“Yeah,” Naruto bit out. “I get it. It makes sense. Cool. So. . .” he trailed off, trying to sort out his thoughts. He had questions for Mizuki, and now they escaped him. However, he remembered the swell of fire and power that rushed through him. Was that. . . was that by design? “What am I supposed to do with it?”

The old man examined him for a long moment, and Naruto could practically feel Kakashi staring a hole in his head. Iruka just looked at his desk, trapped between duty and emotion. “Guard it. Contain it so that it will not wreak havoc.”

“Is that what the previous ones did?”

Naruto realized the second he had made a mistake, because the air in the room went very still. Iruka looked up, and the furrow of his eyebrows betrayed confusion.

“Previous?”

Naruto couldn’t hide his flash of unease, and his heart raced. He raised his voice and stared the old man in the face. “Yeah? Am I the first?” He pointed a thumb at his chest and said, “The fourth hokage just had a seal laying around to seal a demon in a baby? Kinda weird. And you have a whole term for it--Jinchuriki--if it was just me, you could have called it _Narutoki._ So, are there, like, others?”

And, from a stupid, thoughtless mistake, the Hokage said slowly, considering, “No. . . there are others.”

\--

Sakura Haruno decided that sealing was her favorite thing in the world, because now she could pack all the clothes she needed. _And_ wanted. Because, despite the timeline Kakashi gave them for this mission, Sakura knew their sensei would be late to _something_. She was a ninja, not a camper. She would like to avoid wearing the same thing twice. Sure, she could list off all sorts of logical, professional reasons to bring so much: how old clothes held onto scents and were thus a detection hazard; the logistics of slow acting poisons on fabrics; the chance that a comrade would require extra clothing (although picturing Naruto pouting in her dress had sent her into a fit of laughter); and so on, et cetera.

But the truth was that the prospect was gross and unappealing. And with her shiny (amateur) sealing scroll she didn’t need to!

Thus, she packed twice over, sealing the neatly tied off stacks of daily gear in their own brown paper packages for quick access. Slogging through weeks of fuuinjutsu theory with Naruto was completely worth it, and not just for the material benefits. The ideas were interesting. If she had a better chakra capacity, she might even be interested in pursuing it. Sealing development could be a respectable career.

Sakura continued packing and organizing her weapons pouches, but her mind was miles away. It was suspiciously early in their career for team seven to get a C-rank mission. Six weeks earlier than average, even. Sure, it was a glorified escort mission, but even Naruto’s impressive tendency to whine and get away with it shouldn’t have made the hokage himself do anything unwise. Which meant they might be a fast-tracked team.

The idea was exciting as it was intense. Sure, Sasuke was talented enough to make chunin. Sakura prided herself on the knowledge that she could probably opt into intelligence once team seven dissolved. Even Naruto could probably make something of himself just based on raw chakra, if he ever stopped putting his foot in his mouth. But if they were fast-tracked, the team would dissolve that much faster.

It wasn’t just losing access to Sasuke, although that concept filled her with dread. No, Sakura actually liked her unit. More than Ino liked hers, at least, she thought unkindly.  Her teacher, as late and shameless as he was, could be kind underneath all his condescension. Not the worst teacher she had ever had, certainly. And Naruto could have been much more intolerable.

Sakura frowned, and not just because she couldn’t decide if she wanted to bring her nice sleep clothes. She had hated the initial team placement. She had been sure her parents would throw a fit if they found out. Luckily they had both chosen to express their dislike of her choices in the form of extreme disinterest. The downside of this was that Sakura couldn’t really gush about Sasuke, but at least no one asked her about team seven as a whole.

But despite their early warnings about Naruto, and Sakura’s years of interaction with him in the academy, she found being on a team wasn’t unbearable. Not all the time.

Sakura even occasionally _liked_ Naruto. When he wasn’t nagging her or being obtuse or cruel, she could tolerate his banter and yelling. And even when she couldn’t tolerate him, he never got tired of _her_ yelling. He never told her to be quiet, or to quit being so shrill, or to stop being such a know-it-all. Sometimes it felt _infuriating_ that no criticism would make it through his dense skull. . . and other times she was thankful for his thick skin.

Occasionally, Sakura thought, he seemed to delight in her being brainy. When he asked a question and got a lecture, he seemed to enjoy listening--so long as he could follow what she was saying. And he was vocal when he couldn’t.

At the very least, he _talked_ to her. Sasuke sometimes went an entire day without saying so much as a word that wasn’t ‘no.’ And when he did talk, it was never _to_ her. He always looked past her, like she wasn’t there. His eyes would slide over the space she occupied, never registering her presence. It always felt like a punch to the gut, never a slap in the face.

In the academy, it was easy to ignore. Sasuke gave everyone the cold shoulder. That’s what made it fun to get his attention. The little smug part of her could look at Ino and know that in this one pursuit, they were entirely equals. But as the weeks dragged on, and as Sakura no longer had something to prove or someone to prove it to, it became less fun. More desperate.

She had to keep trying, though. Genjutsu had given her an interesting way to spark at least the barest portion of conversation: the more she could catch Sasuke in an illusion, the more reason he had to actually speak to her at all. She absolutely did it because she wanted to get better as a ninja, but she also knew that she practiced too hard for the sake of professional ambition. Well, if love was a professional ambition, she would argue, then she needed a promotion.

She was so wrapped up in debating which pouch would be best suited to hold medical supplies, that Sakura nearly didn’t notice her mother paused in the doorway. But she did, and she paused in order to greet her with a short bow and a smile. “Hello, mother.” Her mother’s jade earrings and distinguished clothing shined from the sunshine streaming through the bedroom window. She must have had a lunch with someone important. “Woodcarver’s guild?” Her father had been trying to negotiate a deal, and her mother often took unofficial meetings to support her father’s activities.

Her mother blinked after a moment, taking in Sakura’s open drawers and displayed weapons. “A dressmaker,” she corrected. “Your first cousin has finally accepted a proposal, and the wedding is to be befitting of her station. I was asked to assist in preparations.”

Sakura nodded, pushing away the thoughts of a wedding, although she was glad for her cousin. Sakura would certainly hear about the details at dinner, so she chose to address the visible question in her mother’s eyes. She had already planned and rehearsed her explanation. “I have been assigned a courier mission. I will be traveling outside the village for the duration and will return in less than a week.”

“Isn’t it rather early for that?”

 _Six weeks so_ , Sakura nearly said, but her mother would know that. She had inherited her memory from her mother, and her mouth from her father. “The hokage believes us ready,” she demurred, “and it is a point in our favor to be esteemed so.”

Her mother stepped closer, looking to the kunai laid out on her bedspread. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose so. You will be missed at the celebration.”

Sakura almost asked which, but immediately realized it was likely a celebration for her first cousin. A soon-to-be bride. “Please pass along my happiness for her.”

Her mother nodded, and then drew up Sakura’s wrist. She examined the bandages on her forearm. Sakura had plenty of cuts and scrapes from training, but this one was deep. It had required stitches.

“Have you been applying the cream?”

Sakura had. She nodded.

“Good,” her mother said. She stared absently at Sakura’s forehead protector, at the dirt worked into the seams. “It will scar, otherwise.”

\--

Of course the fox would want to start a fight. It had been awake and twitchy for a few days, and Naruto’s meeting about the truth was all the permission it needed to go dig its claws into something soft and painful. It got personal and apt and dragged up countless well-discussed fears and a few new ones.

Naruto, obviously, wasn’t in the mood to entertain it. He only had a few hours before he had to leave, and he didn’t want a screaming match before his mission. He just stared down the fox with cold eyes as he unleashed chains, letting them strike and run wild and dig into the monster. “I’m here for the seal. Leave me alone.”

And Naruto let the chains sink and dig and snake until the fox’s muzzle was more metal than flesh.

He ignored the thrashing, tuned it out and shoved it away. There was so much he had learned about the seal through his notes from graduation night. It wasn’t exactly in-depth, but there were a few notes on the mechanics of it. It allowed chakra to seep though. It _encouraged_ chakra to seep through.

Naruto couldn’t understand that. He knew from Hinata that he needed to look at what was unsaid, but he didn’t like the implications. If it was noteworthy that the seal allowed chakra to seep through, then that seemed to indicate that there were more seals that didn’t allow it, right?

Naruto sent his chakra through the seal, feeling out each twist and gap and little idiosyncrasy. He had tried sealing an object with his seal, but nothing happened. Further attempts showed that it wasn’t just a fluke or a bad brush stroke. His copy of the seal was incomplete, and Naruto wasn’t quite sure what he was missing. So, like he had a thousand times before, he dropped into the sewer and felt out the chakra pathways of the cage and matched them to its visual expression.

The process was so route that Naruto found his mind wandering away despite how much he wished he could focus. His brain asked inconvenient questions. Even if he could push away his rougher emotions, because he didn’t want to give anyone a reason to pull him out of his mission, his curiosity was eating him up. Why would the fourth use a seal that let chakra seep through, if all they wanted out of Naruto was for him to contain the fox?

The easiest answer was that the fox protected him. Its chakra had saved Naruto’s hand and then his life.

But Naruto knew he couldn’t accept just that. It was easy, and the easy thing was usually a lie. The harder answer was that Naruto was expected to use the fox. Not only contain it. Not just save people passively, but actively leverage it for the sake of others.

It wasn’t like he didn’t want to. He would happily do it if they asked. He would use it for himself even if they didn’t ask him.

But next inconvenient question was a bit worse, because he would never be able to find the truth. And the truth didn’t _matter._ It wouldn’t change what he wanted, and it wouldn’t ease his life, but he couldn’t help but wonder. . . Would he be allowed to be anything besides a ninja?

Naruto felt though through the twists hidden under the spiral of his seal. He couldn’t see it, of course, but there were some characters hidden. Delicately, he traced them over and over until he could match some to characters he knew. There were only eight. He committed them to memory, relieved at having something done before he went to sleep.

And in the midst of this little victory, he stopped. He looked around, confusion growing, because something in the air was different. Less clean. Less tinged with salt.

A link in the chain snapped. Over the thrashing and roars and yowls that Naruto tuned out, it snapped loudly. Like a string broken on a _shamisen._ A clear and ringing pluck. A sour note.

Dozens of other chain links followed suit. Naruto stared blankly as his chains broke and failed. Sluggish, dull, without body, they fell away from the fox. They sunk into the water. Naruto could not feel them. Naruto could not call more to his aid.

As they broke and shattered and sloughed away, they revealed the fox’s muzzle drawn up into a manic, bloody grin. It panted, even as it drew itself to its full height.

Naruto was too dumbstruck to move.

The fox swiped at the last stray remnants of metal with ragged claws and human hands. “Did you presume this to be your own power?” it whispered; voice screaming-hoarse. It gripped the bars of the cage to either side of Naruto and bared its teeth.

Naruto flinched away, falling away from the seal into the muck below. The cavern was glowing with light thick and wet as an egg yolk, and Naruto nearly choked on the bloodlust seeping down his throat. He struggled out of the water on his knees. It clung to him like tar. It stank of rotting meat.

“This power was never yours. And now, little landlord,” the fox cooed, “her damned chains have finally run out.”

\--

Sasuke Uchiha was, as always, the only one with any situational awareness. Which was why he waited, his pulse rushing with anticipation of a fight, when he spotted a puddle. At first, he thought it was another of Sakura’s genjutsu. It was perfectly rendered but contextually wrong, the type of thing that was more an intellectual exercise than an actual threat. But when it didn’t dispel when he flexed his chakra, he knew. He didn’t hesitate at the sight of his teacher being ripped apart or wait on Naruto to catch up with reality.

He instead, took advantage of the how Naruto’s bright clothing and dumb face drew aggression from rouge cats and ninja alike. His weapons flew perfectly. Cartilage ground beneath his heels. He didn’t freeze. He didn’t stumble.

His body _sang._

And then Kakashi had to be a show-off and efficiently sideline both enemies into submission.

Sasuke eyed his sensei, who looked a lot less disfigured than his spectacle of illusioned blood, and instead just as bored as always. Heart racing from the abrupt end to the fight, Sasuke felt a small measure of petty joy when their teacher insulted Naruto for freezing in understated, vicious sarcasm. Naruto was making all sorts of shocked noises, and Sakura slowly put away her kunai.

Sasuke

Kakashi talked aloud idly, and their client rapidly sobered up. Subtle interrogation and dramatic deceit didn’t really maintain Sasuke’s interest. In fact, he was downright thankful for all the liars and drunks of the world. It gave him the glorious oppertunity to catch Naruto dumbstruck. His teammate was often dumb, but his mouth seldom seemed to recognize it. The moron was determined to eternally pick a fight and he had fast words to back it up. However, in this fight, which actually _meant_ something, Sasuke had six years of working his fingers to the bone, and all Naruto had to his name was talk.

“Hey. Are you alright,” Sasuke called out, feeling a himself actually smile a little, “scaredy-cat?”

Naruto’s shellshocked expression rapidly transformed into fury. He careened forward, the beginning to yell. Sasuke simply leaned to the side and diverted Naruto’s haymaker, throwing him to the ground while keeping a hold on his wrists. And then, after a considering moment, Sasuke sat on him.

Sure, he wasn’t as heavy as Kakashi, but pure outrage destroyed any of Naruto’s remaining critical thinking skills, so he wouldn’t be escaping.

“Maa,” Kakashi complained, looking back at them. “Be professional in front of the client. We want to impart a good impression before we leave.”

The bridge builder in question looked terribly sick, and he began begging without begging.

Naruto suddenly went still and quiet, breathing harshly into the dry dirt. Then, he craned his neck and glared up Sasuke. “Alright, asshole, you made your point. I’m calm.” He was calm, but no less angry. Just more focused about it.

“That’s interesting.”

Idly, Sasuke noted that Naruto’s teeth were quite sharp. He was also going to burst a blood vessel. His ninja career would end from his hot head and internal bleeding and grinding his teeth into powder. Sasuke might have considered this type of behavior beneath once. There was no dignity in sitting on someone, which is why it suited Kakashi as a de-escalation technique. However, Naruto was perpetually annoying and Sasuke was still giddy from his fight, and he didn’t feel like moving without getting his point across.

And his point was a nebulous, abstract thing, but he would probably write it down as _if you pick a fight, at least be serious about winning._

“Sasuke, you bastard, get off of me!”

“Hmm.”

Naruto cut himself off from screaming, and fell silent for a long moment. When he opened his eyes, they were cold. “Please get up. I’m. . . sorry I attacked you.”

Naruto wasn’t sorry, and Sasuke didn’t want an apology, but the sudden moodswing made his victory feel seem inconsequential in the long term. He was being ridiculous. One good kick, one fancy technique with projectiles, and he felt completely entitled to demean himself.

If Naruto could have some pride, Sasuke needed to remember his own. Wordlessly, he got up. He didn’t offer Naruto a hand. His teammate picked himself out of the dirt and roughly slapped the dust off the front of his clothes.

“I’m glad that my cute genin could finally join us,” Kakashi called out to the two of them, patting Sakura on the head. She did a remarkable job of not looking insulted. “Are you frightened? Tired? Hurt? We should head back to the village if so."

“I’m not quitting.” Naruto stared at his feet, oddly pensive. “We said we would complete this mission, and we should. It’s not fair for Mr. Alcohol to lose out just because I froze. And I won’t freeze again.”

Sakura’s mouth tightened into a thin line, and it could be because of Naruto’s disrespectful nickname, but it would figure that she wanted to go home. Especially when Kakashi warned that there would likely be more enemy ninja. Sasuke rolled his eyes, disdain flaring up at the thought of complacency. He would never improve if they trudged back to the village--safe and pampered and put on a shelf until Kakashi decided to actually do something.

“We should keep going,” he bit out, and then turned away. Kakashi would agree or not, and Sasuke wasn’t Naruto. He didn’t beg.

Sakura ducked her head, and Kakashi stared at the client before humming. “I feel so swayed by your, uh, passion of youth,” he informed them. “We will continue on our merry way.”


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura ponders clothing, again. Zabuza has a sense of humor. Naruto goes a little bananas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all the kind support I got last chapter! This is a bit later than my usual update schedule, but I struggled with how I wanted to write the first scene. To all the Sakura fans: hope this delivered! 
> 
> And my slow, slow, slow burn writing is picking up a bit of speed :3
> 
> Content warnings: Drowning.

Sakura began writing her mission report inside her head when the second enemy ninja appeared. It helped her think at all through the blinding rush of panic that coursed through her. She ran through the shinobi rules and tried to squash down every emotion. She had done it for the demon brothers. She could do it here.

_Shinobi ID: 01923422_

_Assailant ambushed us by a large body of water one hour from Wave country. Jonin Hatake Kakashi engaged in combat, instructing team seven to protect the client._

And when that battle took a turn for the worse, she numbly revised her hopeful ‘ _Jonin Kakashi subdued the enemy combatant’_ into the far more dire ‘ _Jonin Kakashi was trapped by Zabuza via a water prison technique.’_

_He instructed us to flee._

Sakura was ready to follow orders. She was. She would have gladly run away. She had been given permission.

But Naruto had to break out that terrible, teasing voice he used when he was feeling vicious.

“Maa, sensei,” he drawled, tilting his head. Zabuza’s water clone had knocked Naruto’s headband right off his forehead, and his spiky hair fell over his eyes. As much as he tried to mimic Kakashi’s unbothered demeanor, his voice was raspy and quiet. He unzipped his jacket and reached into an inner pocket, withdrawing a. . . slip of paper? “You told us what you think about those who abandon their comrades.”

Sasuke’s obsidian eyes flashed grimly, and he made no move to run.

Sakura thought of a logical explanation for this insubordination, even as she wished her teammates were less eager to die. She really didn’t want to die here. She wanted to write this report down.

_Team seven collectively disobeyed that order. Zabuza’s water clones would kill us more quickly than we could escape, and our best chance for survival involved assisting our team leader._

When Naruto rushed forward with only the vaguest promise that he had an idea, she decided that if Zabuza didn’t kill Naruto, she would. The court marshal would clear her of all charges.

_Genin Uzumaki Naruto insisted he had a plan. He did not specify this plan before leaping at Zabuza. Zabuza trapped Naruto in a separate water prison from Kakashi. This prison shrank rapidly over the course of a few seconds. Zabuza expressed confusion, before reestablishing his technique with more water from the lake. Zabuza mocked Kakashi about children’s lung capacity. He was strained from the unexpected chakra expenditure, but patient._

_Naruto began to drown._

Sakura wouldn’t say it was the drowning itself that was terrible. It was watching Naruto’s expression slowly twist from triumph to panic as his plan failed. He slapped a palm over his mouth, and air bubbled up through his gloves. That slip of paper floated through the water, and his prison expanded before Zabuza steadied the technique back to its stasis.

Naruto writhed in his watery prison, clawing at the walls. Kakashi had held his breath for twice as long as Naruto, and yet he didn’t seem nearly as desperate for air.

Sasuke couldn’t do anything, even as he hurled knives and tried to force Zabuza away.

Kakashi couldn’t escape.

Sakura couldn’t think. She stood, useless and pathetically writing her report, imagining how the future would realize itself without even knowing what she could do to change it.

_Genin Uzumaki Naruto died in combat. He died watching as no one helped him._

And then the misty, grey atmosphere shifted. It thickened with a presence that hung in the air like burning hair. Naruto’s water prison began to boil and spit and practically glow like a stove top. Viscous chakra saturated the water, unbelievably dense. Zabuza looked over in alarm, straining to keep the prison stable. The confusion on his face transformed into a terrible look of comprehension, and then glee. He laughed. And laughed. He looked down at Naruto’s snarling, wild face with complete calm. “Oh, I know someone who would _love_ this.”

His water clone fell back in a defensive manner, and Sasuke’s kunai--first testing and then growing frantic--couldn’t scratch Zabuza. Even as he jumped forward and was kicked away, _Sasuke,_ powerful and unstoppable Sasuke, couldn’t do anything.

_Why didn’t Naruto make clones? Why didn’t Kakashi cast a genjutsu?_

Naruto’s headband laid forgotten and scuffed on the ground. Blood ran down Sasuke’s chin and coated his bared teeth.

_Why didn’t Sakura quit asking **useless** questions?_

Numbly, Sakura ran her hands through the signs for a perception genjutsu, extending her chakra with a feather-light precision. With Naruto making such a terrible display of power, Zabuza paid no notice to a soft flicker of  light. He paid no attention to a cowering little girl, or how her hands were at her sides and always had been.

“Sasuke,” Sakura bit out, willing her voice above a squeak. “It’s no use. You need to use shadow clone and attack with fire from opposite sides.”

Sasuke’s nearly snapped at her, before the weight of her words caught up. His eyes flicked between her concealed hand sign and Zabuza. “You’re right,” he said. He raised his hand to Naruto’s textbook sign.

Sakura leapt into action. She rendered smoke, thick and puffy, but less wasteful than Naruto tended to produce. She didn’t bother convincing Zabuza’s brain to accept another chakra signal--it would make the illusion fall apart if she did a poor job. Instead, she crafted several strings, several patterns and pulses that would turn the illusion from an academy clone bluff to something _real._

She nodded sharply, and Sasuke took off to one side of the lake. Zaubuza’s eyes flickered between the two, and he scoffed. “You don’t have the power for that technique, kid.”

Zabuza water clone moved to engage with the real Sasuke, and Sakura pulled those strings taunt. Wet, squelching footsteps pranced over the shoreline. The illusion parted the mist in its wake. It skidded to a stop as the water clone followed Sasuke on the opposite side of the lake.

The illusion flashed through a string of handseals--six she knew for certain, and one she made up on the spot. The grey afternoon bloomed as fire unfurled from Sasuke’s pursed lips, stuttering before the technique could really take hold. Zabuza raised an eyebrow, still unconvinced.

Sakura’s mother always layered clothing with such expertise. Every garment accented the others. Accessories directed the eye. Colors were a targeted response and subtle statement. Sakura couldn’t ever replicate it. Choosing an outfit wasn’t a logical culmination of value, but a creative endeavor that Sakura inevitably failed. She always looked gaudy. The fabrics never fit together. She didn’t have an eye for elegance. She didn’t understand how to a dress become more than the sum of its parts.

But in the midst of her illusion, Sakura couldn’t help but think of the concentrated glint in her mother’s eyes when she pulled together the details to form a masterpiece. Sakura threaded the strings of her illusion and _tugged_.

The ground lit up with reflections, dew turning the grass into a mirror. The fireball rippled over the surface of the lake, sparkling with flashes of red and orange and old. Heat washed over the bared skin on Zaubza’s arms. The crackle of superheated air raced towards him, and the mist nin stared at it with a growing sense of concern.

Sakura didn’t intend the final thread of the illusion, but Sasuke took a blow that sent him skidding over the loamy soil. She smothered his form with smoke and blanketed the area with a uniform, boring slate of there being _nothing_. Nothing of interest at all.

With a sudden pulse of shock and beautiful _doubt_ , Zabuza broke the prison technique and sunk seamlessly into the lake.

Sakura cut the illusion just as Sasuke dispatched the distracted water clone. The chakra drain hit her like a sledgehammer, and she sunk to the floor with an alarmed shout from Tazuna ringing in her ears. She managed to stay on her knees, and she watched with bleary eyes as Naruto clawed his way out of the lake.

That terrible, dense chakra sloughed off of him in clumps. He braced himself on all fours as he hacked and vomited water onto the shoreside, steam rising from his heaving form. When he looked up, his eyes were glowing like embers.

Then Kakashi grabbed him by the shoulder, blurred, and the next thing Sakura knew, she was staring down at Naruto’s unconscious face. His teeth were still bared even in sleep.

“. . . Kakashi-sensei?” she said, confusion and exhaustion making the world into a disjointed mess of signals that she couldn’t parse.

He patted her head. “Naruto could use a nap, I think. You did so well, Sakura-chan. Now, be just a little bit stronger and watch over him.” Kakashi rose, and Sakura didn’t pay attention to following battle. Her terribly ineffective first aid took over, and she rolled Naruto over into a rescue position with trembling hands. He could still drown like this. Why had Kakashi knocked him unconscious when he could still drown?

Despite how long he had been submerged, Naruto’s skin was feverish and flushed. The scars on his cheeks were ruddy. One of his gloves slipped off of his hand, and she began to remove it almost thoughtlessly. Then she flinched. She suddenly understood why Naruto would bother wearing full gloves when shinobi rarely covered their fingertips. His nails were curved and sharp. Not long. They weren’t talons or claws. But they were sharp enough that it was a struggle to put his glove back on and pretend she had seen nothing.

This wasn’t normal.

When Sasuke returned with Naruto’s headband clutched in his palm, she could tell he was just as unsettled by that flash of raw, ugly hatred in Naruto’s scarlet eyes. Neither of them tried to talk about it.

\--

Haku had what Zabuza affectionately described as “a butcher’s delicate touch.” Needles riddled his neck. The pain was immense, but significantly lessened when Haku dutifully patched up the wounds. Zabuza barely tolerated the gentleness. He was still trying to regain feeling in his limbs, and though the weakness annoyed him, he was preoccupied with other issues.

“You’re oddly docile, Zabuza-sama.”

“Your damn needles aren’t the only problem.”

Haku tilted his head, his eyes unfocusing as he checked Zabuza’s chakra signature. “You are very depleted,” he noted idly. “That will slow down your recovery process. I didn’t see you use this many techniques.”

Zabuza rolled his eyes, but a note of wonder was still rattling around his skull. Kohona had a demon at their disposal. Kohona had a very _weak_ baby demon wondering around the countryside. “My water prison technique requires saturating the sphere with my chakra. That provides a physical and spiritual barrier that techniques can’t breach.” Zabuza stretched his neck and tried to feel his legs. “That brat ate the water and my chakra with it.”

“I wondered,” Haku said distantly. “Was that--”

“Fuuinjutsu,” Zabuza confirmed. The esoteric art wasn’t common in Mist, but Zabuza had seen bits and pieces from the Uzushio refugees that were desperate enough to defect to mist. Zabuza had killed one or two kids with blood-red hair during his graduation, and the marks on their skin had offered no protection. “Considering what he is, he probably could have killed me if he just kept calm and held his breath for another minute. I would’ve had to cancel eventually.”

Haku twirled a senbon around and around before casually striking a point in Zabuza’s shoulder. The pain relief was immediate. “’What he is’? Do you recognize his bloodline?”

Of course Haku would chalk it up to a matter of blood. Zabuza grinned. “It isn’t inherited in that sense. That power is the same thing that drives the damn Mizukage. I didn’t know Kohona had one running around. But with his age. . . that might just be the nine tailed fox.”

Of course, Haku wouldn’t know about the hit the leaf village had taken thirteen years ago. He had barely been a child, and the village had tried to keep the extent and cause of the destruction a secret. Zabuza was sure there were other demons populating the land of fire, but the unique potency in that chakra. . . it screamed with the same terrible bloodlust of the Mizukage.

Zabuza hadn’t had reason to describe the details of the Mizukage’s terrible power. However, if they were to face off with those leaf shinobi again, Haku would need to know the nature of what they were dealing with. However, even as he explained and they journeyed back to their outpost in Wave, his mind was preoccupied.

Kisame, that ugly bastard, would probably pay for him alive. His crazy cult had a not-so-private inclination towards them. Although the promise of funds was enticing, Zabuza scrapped the idea. Other countries could offer a bigger pay out.

“If this is such a delicate piece of Kohona’s power, won’t they flee home?”

Zabuza grinned. “They would,” he agreed, “if not for two points. Copy-cat Kakashi is as weak as I am. He won’t be traveling for a few days. And if he were, you could easily kill him.”

Haku smiled at the compliment. “Certainly, sir. And the other factor?”

This one was a bit funnier to Zabuza. “They’ll want to kill us before we can go around spilling secrets.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A wacky omake that probably didn't occur, but who knows?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its been a hot minute since my last update. Still working out the wave arc, but I wanted to leave yall with something.

**Hokage’s office, one day previous.**

Naruto stared down at the skin of his stomach. The seal stood out starkly from his skin. “This is it?”

The hokage nodded somberly. “It is a masterpiece of fuuinjutsu and a terrible burden.”

“So it was written down on my body the whole time?”

“Uh, yes?”

“The whole time? I literally could have looked at it at any point?”

Iruka glanced between Kakashi and Naruto, but he simply confirmed Naruto’s logic. “Yes.”

Naruto nodded, his face screwed up in thought. He managed to make it look quite painful. Finally he sighed and calmed down, letting his arms drop to his sides. Then he tipped his head back and screamed, “This is BULLSHIT!”

The hokage let out a sigh of relief as Naruto launched into a fairly incoherent rant. The boy had been taking this whole situation far too calmly. It was nice to see he hadn’t changed that much.


End file.
